Happy International Women’s Day!
Jan Dean’s latests books are The Penguin in Lost Property, illustrated by Nathan Reed (written with Roger Stevens) and Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, illustrated by Steph Says Hello, and written with Liz Brownlee and Michaela Morgan.
This is one of her wonderful poems from Reaching the Stars.
.
Advice to Rapunzel
Sort yourself out.
Don’t hang around
for someone else to rescue you.
Give yourself a trim.
Pick up the scissors,
it’s not rocket science.
Make a rope ladder.
Twist one. Plait one. Improvise.
Use your head for more than growing hair.
Escape.
Secure the ladder
Shimmy down and leg it.
Don’t look back.
Get clean away
Vamoose. Stay loose.
And learn your lesson.
Staying put beneath a tyrant’s thumb
is dumb.
.
© Jan Dean
Reaching the stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, can be bought here.
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