My Bed is an Air Balloon

When night falls my bed is an air balloon. I sail through the slipsiverse, close by the moon. I float above treetops where fluttertufts are sleeping And flowering hills where the whifflepigs go creeping; Ponds strung with starlight that glitter like glass, A floog with her velvet nose bent to the grass. Such treasures I spy on! My bed in the trees Swings me up high, like a circus trapeze. Now the cool, night-rustling air Slips through my finger-gaps, ripples my hair; Now we glide over water, the moon's silver light Blown by a cloudpuff into the bight, Adrift on the sea where the dream-shapes float; When night falls my bed is a sailing boat. A beautifully presented picture book with two front covers, the text can be read from front to back and vice versa. The mirror form poem meets in the middle in a stunning centrepiece image as the two children in the story (twins, one in an air balloon, the other a sailing boat) meet in the clouds!

Julia Copus has published four collections of poetry and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Costa Book awards. Her most recent collection, Girlhood, was published by Faber in 2019 and was the inaugural winner of the USA's Derek Walcott Prize for best poetry collection by a non-US citizen. Other awards include First Prize in the UK's National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her 2021 biography of Bloomsbury poet Charlotte Mew, This Rare Spirit, was chosen by Sir Andrew Motion as a Spectator Book of the Year and described by John Carey in the Sunday Times as 'a triumph of precise scholarship and imaginative sympathy'. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.