That Awkward Age: National Poetry Day

I have an ongoing fondness for Roger McGough because he writes poetry for children. I first developed a love for poetry when the children were small and as such used to read a lot of poetry books to them; there is one that sticks in my mind (but I can't find anywhere) that used an elevator/alligator word play that Jacob particularly liked. I picked out 'That Awkward Age' at the Central Library the other week and thought I would share one with you for National Poetry Day. There is a lovely selection of poems, mirroring Carol Ann Duffy's 'The World's Wife', that tell the tale of the men behind famous women, and another group of elegy poems that are quietly unsentimental. His dry sense of humour comes through in many of them, writing mostly about the ordinary stuff of life. So I give you this one:

Queue Music

At a bus stop on Princes Road
two people, unaware
that there is a bus strike,
form an orderly queue.

September 1977
and a lovely evening for a walk.
The people in the queue grow restless.
Begin to talk.

Time passes, but not buses.
Eventually the queue, dying of thirst,
sets off down the road
leaving the bus stop to its own devices.

In the corner of a pub
three empty bus shelters away
the queue is sitting at a table
drinking and chatting.

At closing time
(early in those far-off days)
the queue has decided
to form an orderly life together.

Promises are made
as hand in hand 
it walks out into the night.
Cue music and fade.