Skip to main content

Tilly Taylor's Tantrum Poem

In the space of one week, I saw two toddler tantrums while out and about in the world. A poet needs this world wandering to maintain a flow of ideas. And so it was that Tilly Taylor's Tantrum came screaming into my head...

What might you observe that could form part of a poem? What have you seen, or heard lately?


Tilly Taylor’s Tantrum

Attention please shoppers
We have a meltdown in aisle four
Right beside the confectionery stand
Young Tilly Taylor
Age five and a quarter
Is experiencing a throwdown
Customers are advised to avoid this area
Tilly’s mother said No
I repeat, No
I will not add a packet of Jelly Snakes to the shopping trolley…

And so-
A throwdown is happening right now, right here
We have-Whaa!
Piercing screams
Yelling and spit
Devil eyes
Foot stomping
And hate stares
We have trolley rattling
And more…

Shoppers in aisle four are advised to move immediately
To alternative aisles

Tilly’s mother is moving towards frozen foods
In the hope of cooling things down
Tilly Taylor remains in aisle four
Hollering and sobbing
It appears we have a tantrum running out of steam
And scream
Boo-hoo
No jolly Jelly Snakes today
No way
Thank you shoppers for your patience
In this crisis…


Price check on tissues…


Comments

  1. Haha! This is a great poem. I adore imaginary conversations or announcements based on something you see or experience. I am glad I have stumbled across your blog.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York.  I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Peter Dixon -Teabag Poem

Today I'm highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist.   He grew up in London during WW2, and as a boy his schooling was far from successful. He struggled with spelling and the understanding of word, form and grammar, so he tended to write secretly at home, drawing and writing of things largely ignored by schools.   Despite this difficult phase of his life, Peter eventually became a school teacher and then a senior lecturer in education. It often mystified him as to how all of this came to pass. As a teacher, he strived to be unbiased and did not neglect the children who experienced learning challenges.   Peter Dixon became a full time children’s writer and educational consultant. His first book was published in 1978. Whilst living in Winchester, Hampshire, with his family, he   contributed to over 100 poetry anthologies and had seven collections of his own work published including Grow Your O...

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a  metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds.  The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...