In Ms Doningtons’ English class, 9CS wrote their own poems, experimenting with different poetic forms. Immy B wrote an ode to fantasy, celebrating the beauty and power of words and storytelling. Thank you, Immy!

This world’s greatest beauty lives now only as words, 

As graceful phrases, crafted powerful fair, 

Or majestic prose that with delicate poetry blurred, 

Reduces that chasm to a faint line, a single hair’s 

Breadth separates reality from sweet 

Fantasy. In lilac-stained peaks standing lonely 

And proud, glist’ning white cities, strong silver tow’rs 

And spires, golden halls, tragic wars, great deeds 

Of valour, the myths, the legends that exist only 

In that world of wonder created by us to be ours.

Oh, why, why must it be that that fair world is gone, 

Forgotten, drowned in trivialities, seized, 

By metal, by fire, by smoke, choked by ash, that none 

Of what was is as beautiful more, and great seas, 

Green hills, emerald forests, must burn in the fires 

Of greed and desire, that all wild, rugged beauty be tainted 

With darkness, with doom and despair?

Once was nature pure, life an adventure, now a pyre 

Is the Earth, and all things will it burn, and so painted 

Only with words are those things that were fair, 

Their beauty, immortalised now and forever 

In novels and songs and great leather-bound books, 

Yet on many are lost, for their bonds do they sever 

With this world that from childhood exists in our minds, and which brooks 

Such joyful thought, such freedom, such passion, is 

Lost in a world where true freedom is gone, 

And all are constrained to revolve around wealth, around power, 

And those who need nothing are driven solely by this: 

By greed. Perhaps this is the reason we look to the dawn, 

Cherish beauty, escape to it, hour after hour: