Day Seven

(For more information on my 'April Challenge' click HERE)

(I'm posting Day Seven a little head of time as I don't expect to be near a computer on Day Seven. May be a little late with Day Eight for the same reason.)

(31)MAUVAIS SUJET

It’s by Ford Madox Brown. A picture in watercolour. Of his maid, a girl. She’s writing a letter, an apple raised to her kissing-mouth and her hair all tossed and tails. It’s called ‘Mauvais Sujet’. Say it, whispering and soft. And Listen. Then discover the disappointment of translation: ‘Writing Lesson’.

(32)INSPIRED

I do that sometimes. Get so carried away with the writing that I don’t know where I am. Don’t know who I am sometimes. Just the words. Not even on the page. In my head and I’m dreaming, not one part of the dream but all of it at once.

(33)ILLITERATE

She couldn’t write and she couldn’t read. Wouldn’t admit to it. Muddled her way through. Listening at library doors for the words spilling out of books and maybe those words made stories in her head. And listening, too, to the scritch-scratch of pens on paper, thinking they spoke in whispers.

(34)PET

‘An apple for the teacher,’ Amy said, and she placed it on his desk. ‘Keeps the doctor away,’ he said to himself and he didn’t know why… why the doctor away and Amy so near, standing close enough he could smell perfume – her mother’s, something floral dabbed behind Amy’s ears.

(35)THE WRITING LESSON

He showed Melissa how to hold the pen and how much to dip it into the ink: too far, there’d be drips: not far enough, her words all scratches and little substance. But she wasn’t on words yet, Melissa said. Just loops on the paper not sitting on the lines.

(This picture is used as the front cover of Sarah Salway’s book of poetry: ‘You Don’t Need Another Self-Help Book’. You can buy it for the cover or you can buy it for the poems. Either way you won’t be disappointed. I have used it here to say thank you to Sarah for letting me use, here on my blog, her 50-word-snap-written-to-a-picture-stimulus idea. Thank you Sarah… and if I’d been really clever I would have written all that in a 50 word snap!)