Middlefocus

In 1967 when I had just turned 16, I got a summer job working in a fabric shop where my aunt was manager. It was a store selling dressmaking cottons and curtain material and my job was to brush and vacuum the floors. Before leaving to resume school I made it to the sales counter. After those first pay packets I thought I was "landed" - indispensable maybe? The workers there took me under their wings and I fondly remember one old gentleman who must have had a theatrical bent as he would share lines of poetry and plays with me. One day he declaimed the poem below. I can see him still, sure he was giving me a life lesson. I loved it and learning the words from him, I too committed it to memory.  Over the years since I have remembered its key moral message about indispensability.  I had occasion to recall the words recently and typed them in to a search engine. The result flashed back instantaneously. And there was the the poem at the top of the search and importantly the name o...

Travelling on the London Underground recently I picked up this leaflet. Glad I did.... it is a collection of 30 poems from among the 500 which the Foreword says have featured on the Tube since 1986. Poems in the Underground started 30 years ago when a group of friends, writers and poets, with the support of the London Underground had the idea of sharing favourite pieces of poetry with colleague commuters.  The programme has since been adopted over the years by many cities around the world. Some of my old school favourites are among these thirty: Shelley's Ozymandias, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and Keats's Endymion and of course some new to me. Poems on the Underground has been published by Penguin Books in different versions, a hardcover and an e-book in 2012 and a paperback in 2015.  Check out this link  to Penguin for more information. I wonder if some of your favourites are in there and what for you is the poetry pearl in your oyster.