GCSE Descriptive Writing

The Stories

This poem is written in Iambic Pentameter, every line is 10 syllables long. Except in this poem, the last line of each verse is 15 syllables long.

[The poem is written from the perspective of a child listening to stories about her Dad's life]

You paint pictures across the kitchen walls,
Hurl stories over the dinner table,
Smear your early adventures on the tiles,
Scrub them deep into the dirty dishes,
As your tea time tales take flight from your mouth,
I reach out; pluck one tenderly from the air; examine it.

I watch you, cower in the cotton wool snow,
Boys, older, prick your skin worse than the cold,
Needling you with bleak names and empty threats,
Yet as one wrestles you near the iced lake,
You promptly snatch him up, like a rogue weed,
And toss his paper airplane body through the lakes surface.

But such courage couldn't always apply,
Not in Africa nor the Middle East,
Where dictators wielded their lollipop guns,
Journalists rained with bullets in the street,
Where ink-stained news flowed from your fingertips,
And your friends bodies fell, hole-punched, down the stairs of parliament.

You wouldn't risk your life for a story,
But later, you would choose to make your own.

Sitting on a pub's carpet with my mum,
Your whispered forget-me-nots intertwined,
Three days back, you were just acquaintances,
A humble handshake shared in the garden,
Compliments and jokes blossomed from your lips,
Now with no ring and no confidence you casually propose.

I pause for a moment, take a step back,
After years of stories and tea time tales,
They cover every inch of the kitchen,
They clog the drain and fill the flour bin,
All together they're a complete art piece,
Anoungst the paint streaks and smudges I see,
They're even more colourful, since you had me.