Wild Apparitions

A while ago, I posted this poem on my blog. As I mentioned at the time, I wrote it at creative writing club; our teacher read us a poem called "The Deer" by Helen Mort, gave us some wildlife magazines and told us to write a poem about a picture of our choice inspired by Mort's poem. My poem took about five, maybe ten, minutes to write, and I was pretty pleased with it, which is surprising as I don't consider poetry to be my strong point. So this is one of the very few good poems I've actually written.

Anyway, I have now posted this poem on YouTube. I would be very grateful if you could take about a minute of your time to watch it and give me some feedback! Thanks!

Wild Apparitions

I wrote this poem at my school's creative writing club and it was published in a newspaper for the schools in my local area. We were given a load of wildlife magazines and told to pick a picture of an animal and write a poem or a description about it. You can guess what animal I picked when you read the poem. I now have the picture stuck on the back of my creative writing folder (it's very pretty). I wrote this poem pretty quickly, I recall, and oddly it didn't take much editing for me to be happy with it. It isn't often I write a poem I'm happy with, no matter how much time I spend on it or how much I edit it, which is why I thought I'd share this one with everyone.

So, here is the poem:

Perhaps a memory, perhaps a dream,
From a summer long ago:
I turned around and there it was,
Its outline glinting gold.

Its body in shadow in half-light,
Its head held tall and proud –
The wolf stood high and looked at me;
Looked me up and down.

Only a moment it was there,
But forever in my mind.
When the sun glints gold that way,
I turn
And there the wolf I think I find.