My first poem

It was market day cold,
up at five, unfolding tarps
for anyone who said yes,
hard graft for a ten year old
before cornflakes
and a two mile walk to school.
 
Michelle and I sat boy-girl,
squashed on wooden benches
with beetle-blue ink wells
whose capillary action highlighted
the splits in hard fingerprints
that still cant open an iphone.
 
As instructed I lifted the desk lid
and rummaged for a pale blue,
cloth-backed poetry book
and we read the owl and the pussy-cat.
Michelle cried as she did most afternoons,
I was told to never ask why.
 
"Now its your turn to write something"
Miss Eves was not to be messed with,
a shit your pants stare that she had perfected
in a Hansel and Gretel kind of way.
"Write about nature and make it rhyme"
 
November
 
The crack of a fire
No top to a spire
Autumn leaves swirl round
As they fall to the ground
Birds flee their trees
Ponds start to freeze
Winter sets in
like a great white blanket
covered in sin.
 
Miss Eves put it on the wall
without saying a word
and my mother brought it back
from parents evening.
She kept it pressed between
the pages of a poetry collection
written in Lancashire dialect,
I never saw the point.
 
It would be 40 years before  
I would write another poem
and I still don't know why I did.
The exploration of words maybe
or the image of a well crafted simile
or maybe it was a wood where a Piggy-wig stood,  
"with a ring on the end of his nose, his nose
with a ring on the end of his nose"