Poetry was something I never ‘got’. Like ‘rap’, I thought it would be improved considerably by adding music and calling it a song.
Although . . . Spike Milligan’s take on John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ always makes me smile.

“I must go down to the sea again
To the lonely sea and sky.
I left my vest and socks there.
I wonder if they’re dry?”

Limericks, on the other hand, hold great appeal to me.
I find them funny, often clever and, unlike most poems, mercifully short.
Like this one . . .

There was an old man from Bengal
Whose wife was exceedingly tall.
He was three-foot shorter
Than their five-foot daughter
So you could hardly see him at all!

Traditional poetry was never on my radar (or my reading list!) until a news item caught my attention about a poem that, although unfamiliar to me, has apparently touched many people over the years.
Often mistakenly credited to the prolific ‘Anon’, it was, in fact, written during World War Two by a man working for British Intelligence, as a code poem for Allied agents dropped behind enemy lines, in particular Violet Szabo, whose story of unbelievable courage was recounted in the 1958 film “Carve Her Name With Pride”, in which she was portrayed by Virginia McKenna (who was 95 on June 7!).
Cryptographer and poet Leo Marks wrote the poem “The Life That I Have” to honour his dead fiancée and, I have to say, his poem, unlike those by other poets I’ve read, actually touched me.
So much so, my opinion of poetry completely changed. When I did some research into Leo’s work, I was astonished to read that he also wrote the screenplay for the grisly, controversial (and still hard to watch) 1960 film “Peeping Tom”.
He must have been multi-talented to pen that and the poem that has touched so many people.
Here it is . . .

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have,
Is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.