My son is 11 and has been studying this poem at school, It's by Simon Armitage. I really like the way the tape measure depicts the Mother letting go of the child allowing the child to grow and to eventually go off into life on his/her own. I love the analogy. Have a read
Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands. You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors, the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors. You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling years between us. Anchor. Kite. I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something has to give; two floors below your fingertips still pinch the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky to fall or fly.
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