Thank you to everyone who sent love and good wishes re the launch of These Two Hands and the Playmarket Award. Huge thanks to Playmarket and to everyone who send their congratulations. I am so touched and heartened by your kind words.
Mary McCallum (Makaro Press) has been so staunch and such fun to be with — she has made everything so much easier.
Here’s a poem from Ruth Arnison and below it a wee bit of information about The Waiting Room. Ruth is also the instigator of Lilliput Libraries and is delighted that I want to start one in Otaki. She’s sent me the plans and installing a Lilliput Library and spreading the word about them will be my New Year resolution for 2018. So watch this space…
Here’s Ruth’s poem…
Riverton Slide-Show
There’s the brick wall holding back the monkey puzzle tree
and the big house where the window-waiting witch watched
us hurrying to school.
There’s the Havelock St stable and its Tom Thumb jockeys.
We’d dawdle, hoping to rescue black beautiful runaway
horses or even just pat them.
There’s Neil O’Toole sitting outside his pocket size shop
weaving baskets. We’d say shy hellos before racing on,
as though school was an important appointment.
There’s Constable McKeown outside his police station.
We’d find an excuse to stop, wanting to see thieves and
crooks but the jail was always empty.
There’s the gutter where I found a £2 note and told the class
for morning talk. The teacher took it for safekeeping,
and then, silly thing, she lost it.
There’s the chippie cart pulled by two big kids. We’d sit in
the winter corridor eating hot dogs‘n soggy chips
sloshed down with watery cocoa.
There’s the school bell sending us homewards. We’d stop to
look for magical anti-witch caterpillars, then race by the
witchery to our waiting-at-the-gate mother.
Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ) is a Dunedin based arts in health charity. Our aim is to provide a free source of well-chosen poetry for medical waiting room patients, rest home residents, prison inmates, and hospice patients and their families.
We currently print 8000 poetry cards each season and distribute them throughout New Zealand to 1 DHB, 460 rest homes, 610 medical practices, 8 prisons, and 5 hospices. Eight to ten poems, sourced from national and international poets, feature in each edition along with a children’s poem and a haiku – for those short waits! The poems are selected for readers’ enjoyment and are in no way a vehicle for delivering any social/health messages. The cards may be read and left on site or taken away for sharing or further reading.
Each seasonal edition is also transcribed into braille and distributed as booklets to members of our sight impaired community.
For information about Poems in the Waiting Room and its annual poetry competition look here.
Blog: waitingroompoems.wordpress.com
lilliputlibraries.wordpress.com
lovewaltzwithfireworks.wordpress.com
Facebook: Poems in the Waiting Room -NZ
Lilliput Libraries
