DyslexiaaAAARGH - by Ros Asquith
Words are hard
I don’t mean talking
I don’t mean chats,
I mean when words are walking
All over the page.
Then they’re hard
they’re bats
I’m in a rage.
Letters are mad things
they swirl about
daft as brushes
in and out
they won’t stay in the book
they stops, they they rushes
there goes one! Look!
I’m think carefully how
I might just catch an ‘a’
I think I’ve seen one now –
But zaaaaaap. It flew AwAy.
I’m going to creep up sneakily
Now watch , as I lasso a ‘b’
MayBe if I tread carefully
I can make it Be friends with me.
But it’s gone, see?
It’s gone all hazy
into a ‘d’
No NO NO I’m not lazy
It isn’t me
THe ALpHaBEt is crazy.
It needs to be locked up
all of it, yeh, all twenty six
letters, to stop their tricks.
Catch them now! Do it quick
Before they all split.
Lock them up and chain them
knock them down and brain them
tame them and restrain them
put them in a border
put them all in order
they make me sick.
My teacher’s sighing
my mum’s crying
I ain’t lying
I am trying.
But I’m about done with reading
I don’t think it’s reading I’m needing
It’s racing and chasing
and rushing and swirling
and gushing and whirling
and floating and roaring.
Just like letters.
But better.
By Ros Asquith, from her collection of poems Vanishing Trick.
And now we present a brand new poem by Sally Gardner, who told us a bit about her own dyslexia:
I don’t think of dyslexia as disability. It’s a gift. But if you are dyslexic I know school can feel a bit of a nightmare. The bad news is at the moment education doesn’t have enough diversity. For years I was called the dyslexic writer and dreamed of the day that would stop and now it has. I’m a writer who happens to be dyslexic. So to dyslexic children reading this I say, stand up, stick your head up. It’s taken me years to be proud of having dyslexia. So if you have it, be brave.
The Box - a new poem by Sally Gardner
Dyslexia is a word that means frustration,
quite unspellable and a poor explanation
as to all the problems we have in education.
As far as I’m concerned it’s a misinterpretation
of a gift of a great imagination,
and we need freedom from that discrimination.
But I want to ask the question,
if imagination is the fuel of the nation
then why are we judged by such limitations,
not allowed to do oral examinations.
This is a tick box nation,
five seconds of your concentration.
No politician wants to think about school reorganisation
because no politician has the ideas for that kind of conversation.
So what are the implications
in this age of electronic communications,
when we still judge our children by out of date examinations.
Perhaps with a little bit of imagination
we could change the situation
for a whole generation
that feel they have no meaningful representation.
The time has come to think outside the box.
Sally Gardner’s is the author of book including I Coriander, Tinder and Wings & Co: The Matchbox Mysteries.
Catch up with everything we’ve got in our poetry themed week here.
- You may also be interested to find out more about Barrington Stoke’s Picture Squirrel books which were inspired by the story of a young father who struggled to read his children’s picture books with them. The Picture Squirrels have dyslexia-friendly editing and layout to help overcome some of the particular challenges picture books can present for dyslexic readers due to their highly designed layouts
