The Earth's Animals...
I read poetry to the boys during breakfast. It's my daily allowance to the no-books-at-the-table rule. I read Elinor Wylie's Angels & Earthly Creatures--Chimaera Sleeping, and Robin Hood's Heart. Rosemary, Low-Tide, Some Things are Dark and Travel by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Almost everything by Marianne Moore. Sadly, Dorothy Parker is inappropriate for children.
Tired and bored, they shove their eggs around on the plate. Cass twirls his hair. Ollie tugs on the tablecloth. It's an exercise in patience and performance, and every so often we come across the rare simple tidbit that stands out like a nursery rhyme amid complicated verse made unrecognizable to their little ears with words like panoply, chalcedony and cockatrice.
But they sit up, if only briefly, for words they know. For words like these...
There was a child that wandered through
A giant's empty house all day,--
House full of wonderful things and new,
But no fit place for a child to play!
...before resuming routine of absolute indifference.
A couple Saturdays ago, we were headed to a birthday party and Cass was drawing a magnificent, extraordinarily detailed picture on the tag for the present. He was asking how to spell words. We were late. In the car boys! Cass was still crafting words in the backseat, one by one, until I realized that, perhaps, he was writing, gasp!, a poem. When he no longer had any available writing space left on the tag, he asked--no, begged and pleaded--with me to pull over so he could dictate the poem to me. He was on a roll and thinking faster than he could write, so I committed it to paper on the side of Woodward.
A poem, unprovoked, entirely his own.
The Earth's Animals and Survival of the Great Plains
The ground that's green
The rocks that lay
The waters that flood
The fires that flame and flourish
and the birds that fly and funnel.
I have never felt more proud (the title, for the record, is my favorite part.). They're listening. Even when it seems like they're sleeping with their eyes open at the early-morning breakfast table, they're listening.
Tired and bored, they shove their eggs around on the plate. Cass twirls his hair. Ollie tugs on the tablecloth. It's an exercise in patience and performance, and every so often we come across the rare simple tidbit that stands out like a nursery rhyme amid complicated verse made unrecognizable to their little ears with words like panoply, chalcedony and cockatrice.
But they sit up, if only briefly, for words they know. For words like these...
There was a child that wandered through
A giant's empty house all day,--
House full of wonderful things and new,
But no fit place for a child to play!
...before resuming routine of absolute indifference.
A couple Saturdays ago, we were headed to a birthday party and Cass was drawing a magnificent, extraordinarily detailed picture on the tag for the present. He was asking how to spell words. We were late. In the car boys! Cass was still crafting words in the backseat, one by one, until I realized that, perhaps, he was writing, gasp!, a poem. When he no longer had any available writing space left on the tag, he asked--no, begged and pleaded--with me to pull over so he could dictate the poem to me. He was on a roll and thinking faster than he could write, so I committed it to paper on the side of Woodward.
A poem, unprovoked, entirely his own.
The Earth's Animals and Survival of the Great Plains
The ground that's green
The rocks that lay
The waters that flood
The fires that flame and flourish
and the birds that fly and funnel.
I have never felt more proud (the title, for the record, is my favorite part.). They're listening. Even when it seems like they're sleeping with their eyes open at the early-morning breakfast table, they're listening.
posted by meghan at 10:17 PM
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