This week was my students’ first week back at school and, unsurprisingly, it has been a tiring week. Typically my mind slips back into old patterns of defeated thinking when I am this tired. But tonight I found comfort in my favourite type of poem to write – the Spenserian sonnet. I hope it can speak on behalf of other exhausted people everywhere at the end of another working week.

Spenserian Sonnet No. 4: Exhaustion

The week slowly digging its stubborn heels
Into the soil of all our Fridays
And wet dirt clinging to the spinning wheels
Of bright tomorrow’s plans and eager ways,

All things slow down as memory replays
How yesterday our eagerness turned cold
(And last year too was full of yesterdays
Which ended with those endings that we’ve told).

It does not pay, they say, to be too bold
Or spark yourself alight with fiery zeal.
Yet some there are who smile, being old,
And hold still tight to what our failures steal:

The knowledge that tomorrow, sure as sun,
Brings stories fresh and yet to be begun.