I would like to poke a telescope.

Through the earth to Australia,

And there I’d have my own spyhole,

To see the kookaburra.

I would like to take a photograph,

When someone’s fast asleep

Of what’s going on inside their head,

In a nightmare or a dream.

I would like to take a fishing net,

And catch my own reflection

From a gently flowing stream,

As I peer over the water.

I would like to sit on the sun,

As it rises in the morning,

To watch curtains being drawn back

As people are awaking.

I would like to throw a dart

And aim it at the moon,

Like a balloon it would just burst,

And scatter like hail in a storm.

By Charlotte Gledhill, 12, who receives Matthew Sweeney’s The Flying Spring Onion. Submitted by Anita Bruce of Tapton School, Sheffield, who receives the Poetry Society’s teachers’ newsletter, a quarterly bulletin which includes features on innovative approaches to poetry in the classroom as well as news on the latest resources, events and issues. For Poetry Society events, ring 071 240 4810.

The title is apt, all the images are impossible, but sometimes it’s good to try imagining, in a concrete way, the impossible. A lot of poetry for children, in particular, does just this - some of Roger McGough’s and Richard Edwards’ comes to mind immediately. I was particularly taken with the desire to photograph a dream, or fish one’s own reflection from a stream. I felt the rhythm got a but bumpy in some places - look at the closing lines, for example - but I liked the poem’s inventiveness.