Ooh, it was a trickier one today. The prompt was Charles Simic’s poem ‘The Melon’, and the challenge ‘to write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate’.

Here’s one for secondary school children. I’m not fully happy with it, but the basics are there.

Leave of absence

Iraq, someone said. Or Afghanistan.

He’d come back anyway,

done his teacher training,

still kept his hair well short. Asked me

how I could see through that fringe.

Ryan Holbrook used to walk behind

him down the corridor sometimes,

imitating that straight-backed type

of stride he had, and we’d crack up.

But most of it we didn’t know,

not till afterwards.

 

In year 9, he taught us history.

He was alright really, kind of strict,

but mostly okay.

Supported Arsenal,

and he’d talk about them a bit,

if you got him in the right mood.

Not a proper git like Astley anyway.

So that day, when it happened,

no one REALLY meant it.

It wasn’t personal or anything.

He was just another teacher.

 

He was telling us about Mansa Musa,

and we were all like:

More money than Jeff Bezos?

and, What about Mr Beast? Was he richer than him?

when suddenly – BANG!

An engine back-firing?

Some idiot with a daytime rocket?

I still don’t know.

I think most of us would have jumped,

but he threw himself behind the desk,

like there was an explosion in Call of Duty.

 

Some people looked shocked; Amara’s

hands flew to her mouth, but others

to their phones. What even WAS this?

The laughter just erupted, hooting hysteria,

stamping and whooping that brought Mrs Harris

clip-clopping in on her heels from next door,

somehow taking it all in, sending us out to the hall.

They called it a leave of absence,

but he never came back.

Later that term, The Gunners won the FA Cup.

It didn’t feel as good as I’d have thought.