I have just had one of those strange flashbacks…  School days:  We used to do a thing in the summer called Activities Week.  You spent the week doing all manner of exciting things ranging from horse riding to jeux sans frontier to making masks etc.  I got dumped on the poetry picnic because all the popular kids got ice skating, Alton Towers etc.  We had to go to the Rococo Gardens in Painswick to write Japanese haiku poetry.  I think it is a three line poem with 5 syllables, 7 syllables and 5 syllables.  Our teacher said “Walk into the gardens, take in the beautiful surroundings, then sit down and write about the first thing you see.”  So we all walked in and people started to write about the mist in the trees, the beautiful flowers and the sunshine.  I inhaled deeply, in a rather dramatic fashion, sat down by a pretty little pond hidden in the wall and saw…. A dead rabbit floating in the pond!!!

My poem:

Peter Rabbit’s dead
With no bullets in his head
He is in a pond.

!!!!!

They had to hang it on the wall alongside all of the beautiful Rococo garden poetry!!  So funny, but I did win a prize for the most morbid poem.