How to read a poem: For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

Reading it again some 30 years later, now a mother of a five-year-old myself, I am floored by this poem of two halves. For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur AdcockA snail is climbing up the window-sillinto your room, after a night of rain. I think of it as a muted nursery rhyme: a creation ‘for a five-year-old’ but only to be read when that five-year-old is much, much older. Because here is where the poem splits: a sudden bolt of understanding divides the poem, and the narrator, directly in half. Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems (Expanded Edition) (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.