Frogs

That's what it said down the side of a poem in one of my anthologies.

I was writing a lecture on a poem I'd studied in detail on my MLitt course, on which I had written a note to myself at the time. Frogs.

On re-reading it, I had no idea what it meant. I thought maybe it was just a random scribble in a margin. Sometimes I do that - a thought comes to me, someone asks me to do something, etc. and I write it down in pencil on the closest paper thing handy. This could have been a message from my past that had lost its significance now.

But no. I have carefully joined it to a word in a line of poetry with a line and a circle. Frogs are important. They mean something. I wouldn't randomly write frogs and connect it to a line of poetry. So I went looking to see if I could find the poem elsewhere in my collection of poetry anthologies - maybe one of those, with better footnotes, would tell me.

I found one. And it did. But I'm not telling you what it meant.

I like the idea of frogs in the margin.