The Little Reader

Tucked away in a corner of the library
On a mis-‘r-ab-le grey morning,
Sits the tiniest eleven-year-old,
He is my little reader.
His eyes light up when he sees me;
Small, ink-stained hand pulls out a chair.

“Hold that thought,” I whisper.
“I’ll get a book, then be right there.”

At the front, between pencils and paper,
Marked “Better Reading,” big grey box.
I take the name sheet, Simpsons bookmark,
And pick something randomly.

Leafing through the untouched pages,
the large print matter-of-fact and dull,
interspersed with gaudy pictures
of fat children, birds and balls.

My gaze drifts longingly to Fiction
The shelves where fat, dusty tomes lie,
Yellowed pages pressed flat together
With the weight of adventure, toils, love!

I remember so well the first time
When, curled up by main reception,
A little shy, a little embarrassed,
He muttered, “I want to read well”
To his shiny new black shoes.

I want to open up entire universes
To his so-young, so-starved eyes!
I want him to taste words, breathe life into them
Release captives, wild animals, enchantments.
Yet there he sits half-asleep, but content-
A stranger trapped between walls of words
Adrift in a sea of ink he cannot fathom.

His grasp on words painfully poor,
he seems to roll them round his mouth
before letting them fall out
in disordered, laboured chunks.
Looks at me nervously, expecting anger
As from so many teachers before.

But I smile into his anxious face,
Cover up each lump of word
Make him say each one sl-ow-ly
Link them then, like beads on a string.

So proud when a sentence comes together,
or when a new chapter begins.
In his eyes a deep hunger to know, to learn more
In his head he can play out each scene.
Finding meaning in each character,
Less foggy gaps left in between.

His delight in the wisdom he thinks I possess,
In the new words he’s able to say,
His determination to discover new wonders
Make this half-hour the best of my day.

I saw him the other day, with his friends
Rebel sweatshirt, copycat quiff
Shouting, swearing, happy being ‘one of them’.
I watched for a moment, then strode by
As though I hadn’t seen or heard a thing
Remembering my little wide-eyed reader
In the library, those happy grey days.