A poem of a dream of the woods: new writing and illustrations from wild adventuring

With new work by Jackie Kay,
children from The Spinney Primary School
and Elena Arévalo Melville

All children need a place to let their minds roam free, to mix
up language potions, to create and write their own poems. As I
walked into the woods where the children were meeting Jackie, I
thought of many other writers who have found words in the wild
and given, in Jackie’s words, ‘paper wings’ to poems.
This anthology weaves together the landscape of the woods and
the imagination. Although it is rooted in one patch of woodland
in Cambridge, it is a threshold to so many more worlds of
writing and wildness.
/ Helen Taylor, Poetry Advisor

Jackie Kay joined two classes of children from The Spinney
Primary School to explore their woods over four days in summer
2015. The invitation was not to give a masterclass in poetry
writing but to work alongside the children, sharing discoveries
and writing together. The children already knew the woods
well. They had been adventuring there for several weeks with
CCI artist Deb Wilenski and their teachers, Jenny Ryan and Emily
Garrill.
They also knew some of Jackie’s work, especially The world of
trees. In their very first visit Year 1 found places for phrases from
this poem to live in the Spinney, and when Year 3 found them
the following day they were intrigued: Maybe it’s someone’s
dream and they left it in the woods. Maybe it’s a poem of a
dream of the woods.
These four days were extraordinary. The children and Jackie
wrote prolifically together. This collection shares Jackie’s new
poems and a small selection from the children’s journals. They
are illustrated by the children’s drawings of trees and monsters,
alongside on-site sketches and a new Fantastical Map of
Spinney Wild Woods by illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville.

A poem of a dream of the woods
new writing and illustrations from wild adventuring
/ Jackie Kay
/ Children from The Spinney Primary School
/ Elena Arévalo Melville

Contents
Foreword: Jackie Kay
10 Saps and rings and things to say in the forest / Jackie Kay
12 Ink! / Antonia Anderson
13 A poem of a dream of the woods / Micah Green,
Alice Haughton, Hannah Saji, Michael Xu
14 The music department in the woods / Jackie Kay
16 The sound of the woods / Katie Whitehead
17 My tree would say / Elia Doza
18 The tree will say / Noel Thomas
19 Once upon a time / George Stephens

22 I am a twin tree / Lucy Stephens
24 Trunk / Jackie Kay
26 The Y valley / Jackie Kay
30 Secrets / Ashleigh Blythe-Summers
31 Lost and found / Reuben Huggins
32 How to lose myself / Jon-James Day-Simon
33 Abdullah likes this poem / Jackie Kay
34 The wind of the skies / Rocco Watson
35 The lost silver / Micah Green
36 Two stanzas for the Spinney / Jackie Kay

Foreword / Jackie Kay
The woods, spinneys, openings, forests, the magical world of trees and barks
and roots…
As an adult you return to your time in the woods again and again: the dens
you made, the promises, the secrets, the friends, pledges, potions. You half
imagined that you might just end up living there for good – like a child in a
fairytale for days and nights and days. You remember counting the rings of the
trees, finding strange shaped fungi, the fresh smell of new leaves, the crunch
and squish of autumn ones, you remember it vividly, if you are lucky, if you still
possess the tiny golden key that unlocks the door to your childhood
imagination.
Working with the wonderful children of The Spinney took me back there, put
the tiny key into my writer’s hand. They reminded me how the imagination
works. The Spinney kids made worlds of the trees and worlds within the trees:
they absolutely loved the place. All imaginative play is timeless; being with the
children reaffirmed how vital it is that we have time without screens and
tablets, without so-called learning tools, so that our minds are allowed to
roam free. When our minds are free, the imagination runs along, happily
keeping up.
There were twig ships and dragons, there was the royal castle in the wood,
pathways through nettles. There were chefs in the wood and factories. Jobs
to be done or stolen. There was the daytime world of The Spinney and the
imagined night-time one where the stars would keep dancing in the company
of the trees, guarded by the keepers of the night.

The Spinney triggered memories, and gave us brand new experiences. The
children lost things and found them, made magic potions and drank them, and
created stories to explain the dried up lake that lost its golden fish. And yet
the music still played through the trees, the magical music of the deep dark
bark in the music department in the woods.
It was fabulous to take part in such imaginative play, to join in and create my
own poems and even more fabulous to listen to the outpouring of the poetry
that The Spinney wove. We made poems by mixing ingredients, the language
that dropped naturally from the branches and bubbled up from the roots.
Nettles, charcoal, bark, ivy, and sticky weed: we mixed with earth and soil and
leaves.
Poems arrived out of spells. And we didn’t mind if our words turned to dust,
or sawdust. The poem, we accepted, might take a while to cook. Often children
put their poems in a solid magic cabinet to see the changes that would
ring through. It was wonderful watching the poems being printed in the creative
landscape of the woods and just as wonderful to watch them vanish with
disappearing ink.
We formed a magic circle at the beginning and end of each day, drank our
juice and ate our biscuits and shared our ideas. Everyone had different ideas
about what to do and how to write a poem. Kirsten put it very well: ‘I love the
wild woods, it makes its own decorations in its own mind.’ I wouldn’t have
swapped my time at The Spinney for anything. Here are our poems, woven
together.
/ January 2016

Saps and rings and things to say in the forest
Drink the magic potion
And dream of what was lost
Like the trees dream of saps and rings
And nettles dream of nests
Dream of what became ash
Our loved ones, and what was returned to earth
Like the trees dream of saps and rings
And nettles dream of nests
The last words of the magic forest belonged to Tavi
Who said this – sleep in the magic forest is bliss!

The trees dream of saps and rings
And nettles dream of nests
The long piece of bark lost its tree, said Alice
The bark is treeless, sleepless ones dream on, said Yijin
And the trees will dream of saps and rings
And nettles dream of nests.
/ Jackie Kay (age 54)

Ink!
The breath of a tree monster
The legs of a spider
Mix it up.
Add some enchanted feathers
Put in the bark of a moving tree
Grind up the mushrooms of a fallen tree.
Now you can write!
/ Antonia Anderson (age 8)

A poem of a dream of the woods
High above
In the cold night air
A canopy
In the middle of the forest.
The wind fluttered
The leaves flapped their wings.
Many roots
Waiting for another tree.
Dreaming
Of bony fingers
Like stars sparkling.
/ Micah Green (age 7) / Alice Haughton (age 8)
/ Hannah Saji (age 8) / Michael Xu (age 8)
(using words and phrases from Jackie Kay’s The world of trees)

The music department in the woods
I like the music department in the woods
The way you can hear the air,
The soft music of the trees and the blue bells ring
And the ivy sing, the way the very leaves lift
Their voices, drop their notes and sing,
The percussion of the bark
Inside Kirsten’s circle of trees, the made of wood
Cello and viola, and all the wood instruments,
The single reeds – basset horns and saxophones,
End blows and double reeds, capped.

JJ will conduct the jazz band of the wood,
The orchestra that does everyone good,
In the pit, in the deep basin
And even the resin will weep for good reason
At the beauty of the music of the woods…
And afterwards nettle tea, or peppermint, you choose,
Left to brew for five minutes
Your imagination stews for longer than peppermint.
You think of the way the branches played their bows
The way the bark hit those notes.
/ Jackie Kay

The sound of the woods
The sound of the woods.
Listen to the sound of the trees
All the trees make a different sound.
Vines hang down
Litter lies on the floor
Toads leap around
The bottles go crunch
Children go wild
As they are released in the wild wood.
Listen to the sound of the trees.
/ Katie Whitehead (age 8)

My tree would say
My tree would say he is afraid
My tree is afraid because of the wind
I would say to my tree I am cold
Animal is howling
If I was an old lady I would say to this tree:
‘Look how lovely this tree is
It’s lovely because of the bright leaves.’
/ Elia Doza (age 6)

The tree will say
The tree will say: ‘I will wake
I will move and I will go
And go, go home.’
I will play
I will remember playing.
/ Noel Thomas (age 6)

Once upon a time
Once upon a time,
When the lake wasn’t dry,
Fish filled it
Reeds grew in it
Swans swam in it
Herrings fished in it
And those memories, now, today
Keep the lake going day by day by day.
/ George Stephens (age 8)

I am a twin tree
I like standing in the wood. I am a twin tree.
I like my twin tree. She is nice.
I am a girl too.
I like patterns but my sister likes things that are smooth.
I do not like smooth because it makes me fall asleep.
I don’t have a bed. Instead I sleep standing up with my sister.
I hope I never get cut down.
I hope the children come back soon.
I like the children.
I want to be bigger.
I don’t want to run away from the Wild Wood.
I don’t want to move school.
I like the Wild Wood.
I like the Wild Wood.

I like coming out and looking
At the smoke from the fire dying down.
I soar up then glide down.
Nobody knows about me, nobody except you.
Only you know about me.
I liked going in the Wild Wood.
When I was a child and I was six.
Most things were taller than me.
I was really happy in the Wild Wood. It was nice.
I made a bug house with my friends.
I caught a baby worm but it wriggled away.
I still miss that worm.
I liked holding it. It tickled me.
I like squiggly worms.
/ Lucy Stephens (age 6)

Trunk
The tree trunk is the colour
Of an African elephant’s legs:
It has the feel of a cheese grater.
Years later
I remembered them –
The lost children of the woods –
And their names came back to me:
Avia, Cheng Cheng, Aisha, Pavel, Billy P.
By then I was an old woman,
My legs like those trunks, swollen
And all of my secrets locked away
In the old wooden trunk
From India in my living room,
Downstairs, where I hardly go anymore.
And my old heart is a wooden chest.
And my old feet are rooted to this place.
/ Jackie Kay

The Y valley
The long tree boat will soon set sail – bye-bye! –
Only to places beginning with Y
Y is its shape – and that’s the reason why
All the places have to begin with Y!
So off it goes with a good wind behind it:
To Yemen, Yass, Yalta, Yuba City,
To York, Yellow Knife, Yangtze
To Yellow Stone Park, Yellandu! Phew.
To Yala, Yukon, Yamba, Yichang,
To Youngstown, Yushu, Yushkozero,
To Yelwa, Yabrud, Young Range, Yubari
And finally, you guessed it, to the Y Valley!

Where absolutely everybody stops to ask Y.
Where every answer begins with because…
(Y is only interested in Y
Not in what, when, how, X or Z.)
The long tree boat searches for kindred, roots,
Friends in the forest of trees:
Barking family members, branches,
Who hold out their spindly arms in winter.
Explorers find crucial things to take on water.
Y are we going where we’re going asks Yana.
Because we need to KNOW says Elia Doza.
We’re going to find the soft land across the water.

And to the new land we will bring:
A rotting old bicycle, a soggy ball, a small frog,
A marshmallow, shells, a toaster, a leaf,
Some charcoal and a bath to fill with water.
What’ll we miss asks Oliver?
I’ll miss the rainbow tree, its pitter-patter
Answer Lucy, Ellie and Yana together!
I want to take a banana, says Eva’s twin Ana.
And so off we set sail again
On the boat of many questions
Hoping we’ll definitely see sea-lions,
Irrawaddy dolphins, red-lipped batfish,

Jumbo octopus, living rocks, secret caves,
The magic box, a bearded vulture, aging stones
A Gobi gerboa, giant oarfish, Pacu fish
And, at the bottom of the sea, a sole buried wish.
Safe to say, we return to the Y valley always:
A dip and a flip away, a skip and a jump away.
It is endless, the way one Y leads to another,
The way everybody asks y, y, Y
The livelong day, sun up to moon swoop;
Birds take flight like questions in the sky.
We take it all in with our bold-beady eyes.
Whoops. We’re off again, must hurry – bye!
/ Jackie Kay

Secrets
A secret den
And when you are inside
You will see a secret chair
And when you turn around
You will see a bathroom
And you can see a secret bath
When you go into the kitchen
You will see a secret button
If you go into the secret bedroom
You can see a secret bed
When you go into the attic
You will see a secret box.
/ Ashleigh Blythe-Summers (age 6)

Lost and found
I am lost in words
Without the lake.
It was just a
Little make
Of the wood
Then I found
A golden ore
And when you find that
The wood comes back to play.
The trees come back
With their roots
And then I look
Into the lake
And all the water
Comes running home
Like you and I.
/ Reuben Huggins (age 8)

How to lose myself
Myself
In the lake
Then the lake had no water
All by myself.
/ Jon-James Day-Simon (age 9)

Abdullah likes this poem
Abdullah likes this poem
That is shy to be read.
He watched it open its paper wings
And spin, landing on his head.
Abdullah buried his head in his hands,
But still the poem fluttered like a butterfly
Across his ears, in front of his dark eyes.
Around the room Abdullah was in.
By now Abdullah had fallen in
Love with words, with birds that are poems
And poems that are birds – and so
The little poem flew anew blushing, singing.
/ Jackie Kay

The wind of the skies
Leaves are blowing
The pond is resting
Across the beautiful woods
I always wonder what I could do
In the wind of the skies.
/ Rocco Watson (age 8)

The lost silver
Beneath the fallen tree
Struck by lightening
There lies something silver
It was lost by me and found by me
Then its power turns the woods into winter
With deep white snow
As the swallow calls its final call
The silver returns to its place.
/ Micah Green (age 7)

Two stanzas for the Spinney
In the Royal Castle of the wood
The Princess Gatekeepers wait
For the things that ordinary people wait for
For peace not evil, for good luck not bad,
And for life to change for good or ill
And not just stay the same.
Meanwhile Rehan and Viren
Keepers of the night, guarders of the night stars
Hear the who whit who woo of
The wise-eyed old wise owls
Who bring the dawn to the night, dish out fate
As the Princess Gatekeepers wait out of sight.
/ Jackie Kay

How we got here:
Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination works in local wild spaces,
leading projects of wild adventuring for people of all ages. This work is
supported by Arts Council England and Cambridgeshire County Council,
and as a social enterprise we raise money from trusts and foundations.
Thanks to a generous donation from Linda Baston-Pitt and her
colleagues we have been working with The Spinney Primary School
since 2014 to establish Spinney Wild Woods as a space for imagination
and curiosity. We have led projects with three different classes, hosted
a number of events and a wild exhibition.
The poems and creative work collected here are drawn from our
project in spring and summer 2015, when we worked with Year 1 and
Year 3. Every child’s contribution was important and we would like to
thank them all.
Year 1: Megan Birch, Ashleigh Blythe-Summers, Sofia Bukhari, Yusu
Chen, Zachary Cooper, Avia Doza, Elia Doza, Oliver Hardy, Andrei
Karpovych, Roland Kreiter, Martin Kulesha, Pavel Lomonosov, Timofei
Lomonosov, Ana Makljenovic, Eva Makljenovic, Yana Manolova, Ellie
Mosbach, Billy Murphy, Majd Najib, Hancheng Pan, William Petchell,
Jake Plumb, Layl Raydan-Watkins, Aisha Saleem, Lucy Stephens, Noel
Thomas, Adam Wallman, Thomas Widdowson, Eryk Wojtowicz, Kelvin
Xue
Year 3: Antonia Anderson, Gabriel Baines, Lucie Barnshaw, Viren
Bathula, Kabir Botre, Sevgi Cellik, Jon-James Day-Simon, Louise Dennis,
Mervat El-Akkad, Charles Eschle, Emily Fallon, Rehan Fernando, Micah
Green, Alice Haughton, Reuben Huggins, Abdullah Hussain, Jakob Kanz,
Lilly King, Ivan Kulesha, Kirsten Limb, Harvey Linney, Yijin Liu, Octavian
Marinas, Summer Midgley, Jack Pearce, Hannah Saji, Muhammad
Ahmad Sami, George Stephens, Rocco Watson, Kate Whitehead,
Michael Xu
The children’s explorations can be seen in more detail in our project
diary pages:
www.cambridgecandi.org.uk/projects/footprints/wild-exchange

This publication has been made possible by the generous support of
My Cambridge, one of fifty Cultural Education Partnerships across
England, enabling young people ‘to confidently construct their own
cultural lives, drawing on and feeling connected to the city in which
they live’:
The work that The Spinney Primary School children have undertaken
with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination beautifully illustrates one
approach to making this possible. The children’s sense of profound
connection to the Spinney Wild Woods which has been developed
through playing, drawing, writing and imagining, has created
memories that will stay with them for a lifetime.
/ Rachel Snape (Head Teacher)
With thanks to:
Mary Jane Drummond and Helen Taylor for their skillful editing and
guidance; Rachel Snape, Headteacher of The Spinney Primary School,
for sharing the Spinney Wild Wood with us so generously; Jenny Ryan
and Emily Garrill, Year 1 and Year 3 teachers at The Spinney Primary
School, for inviting us into their classrooms so wholeheartedly.
Graphic design and illustrations / Elena Arévalo Melville
including trees and monsters by Antonia Anderson, Louise Dennis,
Rehan Fernando, Abdullah Hussain, Yijin Liu, Octavian Marinas,
Hannah Saji, George Stephens, Michael Xu
Design concept and editing / Deb Wilenski

I have been working with young children in wild places for over
ten years and I haven’t yet met a child who doesn’t love trees.
They climb in them, shelter under them, invite branches and
leaves into games, lie dreaming in them. The children’s trees in
this book are all drawn from memory. I was struck by the detail
and intimate knowledge each carries. They had noticed so much
even in the midst of fast and dramatic play, as kingdoms fell and
monsters rose from mud.
Children need trees and trees need children. We are very happy
to contribute the voices in this publication to the work of The
Charter for Trees, helping to maintain its pledge to be rooted in
the stories, experiences and memories of young people.
/ Deb Wilenski, CCI artist
www.treecharter.uk

ISBN: 978-0-9926259-4-8
Published by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination
www.cambridgecandi.org.uk
© Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, 2016
A Fantastical Map of Spinney Wild Woods
©Elena Arévalo Melville 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form without prior written
authorization.
CCI would like to thank Jackie Kay for permission to
reproduce her poems.
CCI is a company limited by guarantee.
Registered in England no.06301716.
Registered Charity no.1126253.