Tony Mitton
Poet & Children's Writer
Entrance
Come into this poem. Step through this little gap between the words, and who knows what you'’ll find? Some secret passage tucked inside your mind? A flight of steps that wind down to a door that opens on a wood where once you stopped and stood? Then through the trees you think you hear a stream. It whispers faintly of a distant dream in which you knelt and looked into a pool and saw your own face gazing, clear and cool . . . . .
You stumble on to find a lisping brook whose ripples are the writing in a book. Its text is strange and hard to understand. And as the pages flutter in your hand, you snap it shut to place it on the shelf . . . . . then see you'’re in the poem of yourself.
Tony says ...
Sometimes a poem or text may seem to enter the mind and interact with it. Sometimes it can be more as if it is we ourselves who enter the text. We seem to step into the story or poem. Also, the world of the story or poem shares something with the world of the dream. They all happen in the imagination. This poem plays a game with the imagination. Like Alice stepping through the looking glass, or Will stepping into a parallel universe, it suggests that we may step into the poem itself, between the words, to enter the world of the imagination. The title is a pun. Entrance. That can mean simply the place where we enter, the doorway. Or it can mean what happens to us when we do so. Entrance. To put a spell on one. To captivate with magic. This poem invites you, the reader, to consider that just by being alive you are, in a sense, writing the poem, or story, of yourself. Which, of course, you are, aren’t you? So just plain, ordinary life turns out to be magical after all, doesn’t it? Poetry can help us to see the magical in the ordinary.
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