‘Glad that I live am I;

that the sky is blue.

Glad for the country lanes

and the fall of dew.’

Or so assert 200 voices, yours included,
mustered to assembly off the Edgware Road.
At this point in the life you’re glad of
you’ve not seen a country lane. It must be nice.
One day you’ll ask your mum and dad to take you.

‘After the sun the rain;
after the rain the sun.
This is the way of life
till the work be done.’

What work? you wonder. Sums, till break,
and spelling after that?
(You’re good at spelling in your second language.)

‘All that we need to do,
be we low or high,
is to see that we grow
nearer the sky.’

The stumbling scansion you’re too young to analyse
and yet you feel it. And, persistently,
each time you sing the hymn,
who’s low? I’m short, maybe,
so does the poem mean us children?
Even when I’m high, the sky will still be far away.

Class Five, instructed, files out from the hall.
Arithmetic it is. The London sky,
glimpsed through the window as, in unison,
your voice and 40 others multiply,
is grey, not blue: sure proof
that rain is after sun.

Although you love to skip rope on the roof,
you know, today,
your way of life will be subtracted to wet play.