Sister Joseph’s preferred penalty for primary school offenders was to banish us to the cloak cupboard at the back of the classroom.

I didn’t see it as a punishment. It got me out of mathematics and into my imagination—a rabbit warren where I’ve been a refugee ever since.

A secondary school teacher introduced me to drugs—the narcotics of rhyme, rhythm, and metre. I’ve been addicted ever since to an art that can make nuclear emotions from word-sized grenades.

Why does it survive as doggerel at our birthdays. weddings, retirements, and funerals? Why doesn’t it just lie down and die?

Our daughters have gifted us grandchildren. Their first serious presents to their children were nursery rhymes; poems; music in words; words as music which, when I read them, don’t just fully return to me. They connect me to the generations before me and those that will follow. That’s the value of poetry. That’s what I want to protect.

That little boy in the classroom cloak cupboard grew up, but the womb-music of his mother’s heartbeat in his head never went away.

I’ve written to my grandchildren to explain the grip poetry has on me. I hope I’ll embarrass them less at their weddings, and that they’ll feel less sad for me at my funeral.

Suppose I claimed that poetry contained

The heartbeat and the music of our tongue?

And further, that in verse we see explained

All memory, hear resurrections sung,

And come to terms with crib to grave in rhymes?

My theory isn’t that far off the truth.

Poetry’s been here since ancient times.

We most had Humpty Dumpty in our youth.

A few of us continued in our way

To grasp a little Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake.

Some swear the art is dead or dying; they

Insist it’s time to burn it at the stake.

Think Larkin though, who bleakly yearned to prove

Through verse: ‘What will survive of us is love’.

Poetry is concentrated emotion. It can explain, heal, comfort, inspire, and lead us to love, courage, and death.

When all else fails, great poetry consoles.

Roger G McDonald