GRADE 8

POETRY PACK

TERM THREE – 2022

Snow

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth

I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,

which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name
as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.

How are you doing back there? I shouted,

and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,

steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place

so cold any movement saves you.

Ho! You bang your hands together,

stomp your feet. The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.
Ode to an Encyclopedia

By James Arthur

O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living room,

O authority stamped on linen paper, molted from your dust jacket,
Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion
on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains
behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a sail
and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map
of the mountain ranges on the far side of the moon
and could name the man who shot down the man
who murdered Jesse James. At forty, I tell myself
that boyhood was all enchantment: hanging around the railway,
getting plastered on cartoons; I see my best friend’s father
marinating in a lawn chair, smiling benignly at his son and me
from above a gin and tonic, or sitting astride his roof
with carpentry nails and hammer, going at some problem
that kept resisting all his mending. O my tome, my paper brother,
my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram of a cow
broken down into the major cuts of beef, and an image
of the Trevi Fountain. The boarding house,
the church on the corner: all that stuff is gone.
In winter in Toronto, people say, a man goes outside
and shovels snow mostly so that his neighbors know
just how much snow he is displacing. I’m writing this
in Baltimore. For such a long time, the boy wants
to grow up and be at large, but posture becomes bearing;
bearing becomes shape. A man can make a choice
between two countries, believing all the while
that he will never have to choose.
An extract from 'Another Night Before Christmas'

By Carol Ann Duffy

On the night before Christmas, a child in a house,

As the whole family slept, behaved just like a mouse . . .

And crept on soft toes down red-carpeted stairs.

Her hand held the paw of her favourite bear.

The Christmas tree posed with its lights in its arms,

Newly tinselled and baubled with glittering charms;

Flirting in flickers of crimson and green

Against the dull glass of the mute TV screen

The hushed street was in darkness. Snow duveted the cars –

A stray cat had embroidered each roof with its paws.

An owl on an aerial had planets for eyes.

The child at the window stared up at the sky,

Where two aeroplanes sped to the east and the west,

Like a pulled Christmas cracker. The child held her breath

And looked for a sign up above, as the moon

Shone down like a gold chocolate coin on the town.