Granny

Granny’s come to our house,
And ho! my lawzy-daisy!
All the childern round the place
Is ist a-runnin’ crazy!
Fetched a cake fer little Jake,
And fetched a pie fer Nanny,
And fetched a pear fer all the pack
That runs to kiss their Granny!

Lucy Ellen’s in her lap,
And Wade and Silas Walker
Both’s a-ridin’ on her foot,
And ’Pollos on the rocker;
And Marthy’s twins, from Aunt Marinn’s,
And little Orphant Annie,
All’s a-eatin’ gingerbread
And giggle-un at Granny!

Tells us all the fairy tales
Ever thought er wundered—
And ’bundance o’ other stories—
Bet she knows a hunderd!—
Bob’s the one fer “Whittington,”
And "Golden Locks" fer Fanny!
Hear ’em laugh and clap their hands,
Listenin’ at Granny!

“Jack the Giant-Killer” ’s good;
And “Bean-Stalk” ’s another!—
So’s the one of “Cinderell’”
And her old godmother;—
That-un’s best of all the rest—
Bestest one of any,—
Where the mices scampers home
Like we runs to Granny!

Granny’s come to our house,
Ho! my lawzy-daisy!
All the childern round the place
Is ist a-runnin’ crazy!
Fetched a cake fer little Jake,
And fetched a pie fer Nanny,
And fetched a pear fer all the pack
That runs to kiss their Granny!


— James Whitcomb Riley

In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old

With troubled heart and trembling hand I write,

The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
How oft with disappointment have I met,
When I on fading things my hopes have set.
Experience might ‘fore this have made me wise,
To value things according to their price.
Was ever stable joy yet found below?
Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?
I knew she was but as a withering flower,
That’s here today, perhaps gone in an hour;
Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
Or like a shadow turning as it was.
More fool then I to look on that was lent
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell dear child, thou ne’er shall come to me,
But yet a little while, and I shall go to thee;
Mean time my throbbing heart’s cheered up with this:
Thou with thy Saviour art in endless bliss.

-- Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), British born American Puritan poet; first woman poet to gain acclaim in the New World and New England. She emigrated to America in 1630 with her father and her husband aboard the Arbella and settled in Ipswich, MA. She bore eight children between 1632-1655. From her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

This elegy, one of several she wrote during the catastrophic year of 1669, was written when her namesake grandchild died, and is remarkable for its bitterness indirectly aimed at God, and is representative of her struggle with accepting the Puritan belief that death was merely the passage to eternal joy in Heaven.

Due to the eventual longer lifespans of Puritans in the new World as compared to Europe once the colonies were established, it was said that "New England invented grandparents."

You can find excellent commentary on this poem by Janice Miller Porter here.

Foster Care

Each house smells of strangers:
cabbage boiling on the stove,
harsh soap at the rim of the sink,
starched sheets that scrape
against the skin in bed,
hard pillows shaped
by someone else’s head,
rotting bananas, sweaty feet and dust.

Each time we come to a new place
I try to hide one shirt
beneath the mattress
just to keep the smell of home.
Sometimes they find it,
squeeze it through the wringer;
hid long enough, the cloth absorbs
the air around it, loses its memories.

My brother smells like sour milk,
unwashed armpits and the school paste
he eats. He cries
when they hit us; I never do.
Each night I hear
his sniffles soak the pillow.
Come morning, I grab the damp case,
hold it to my nose and breathe.

--Terry Wolverton (1954- ), American poet and LGBTQ activist, from Embers, 2003.

Image by Brian Jackson, from stock.adobe.com

Poems

I am hardly ever able
to sort through my memories
and come away whole
or untroubled.
It is difficult
to sift through the stones,
the weighty moments and know
which is rare gem,
which raw coal,
which worthless shale or slate.
So, one by one,
I drag them across the page
and when one cuts into the white,
leaves a trail of blood,
no matter how narrow the stream,
then I know
I’ve found the real thing,
the diamond,
one of the priceless gems
my pain produced.
“There! There,” I say,
“is a memory worth keeping.”

--Nikki Grimes (1950- ), poet, author, and writer for children, from Poetry magazine.

On the Beach at Night

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892), one of America's pre-eminent poets, printer, teacher, editor and clerk whose innovations and subject matter both shocked and influenced the writing scene of his lifetime to today.

Fishing

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.


--A. E. (Alicia) Stallings (1968- ), American poet and translator, recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.

Scripture reference: Matthew 4:12-23 3 Epiphany A

September, the First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

-- Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) American poet, two time poet laureate of the United States (1963-1964 and 1988-1990) and professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

To David, About His Education

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

-- Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), poet and teacher at Washington University in St. Louis

little tree

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"

--e. e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet, painter, and playwright

Advent

Wind whistling, as it does 
in winter, and I think 
nothing of it until

it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down

to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned—then glad

to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.

Look, in my surprise
I somehow split a wall,
the last one in the house

we’re making of gingerbread.
We’ll have to improvise:
prop the two halves forward

like an open double door
and with a tube of icing
cement them to the floor.

Five days until Christmas, 
and the house cannot be closed.
When she peers into the cold

interior we’ve exposed,
she half-expects to find
three magi in the manger,

a mother and her child.
She half-expects to read
on tablets of gingerbread

a line or two of Scripture, 
 as she has every morning
inside a dated shutter

on her Advent calendar.
She takes it from the mantel
and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,
as if her future hinges
on not tearing off the flap

under which a thumbnail picture
by Raphael or Giorgione,
Hans Memling or David

of apses, niches, archways,
cradles a smaller scene
of a mother and her child,

of the lidded jewel-box
of Mary’s downcast eyes.
Flee into Egypt, cries

the angel of the Lord
to Joseph in a dream,
for Herod will seek the young

child to destroy him. While
she works to tile the roof
with shingled peppermints,

I wash my sugared hands
and step out to the deck
to lug the shutter in,

a page torn from a book
still blank for the two of us,
a mother and her child.

--Mary Jo Salter (1954- ),  American poet, editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and essayist,  from Open Shutters: Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)

In the Islands

Parents had gone where parents go,
except for Mrs. Pocket, who sat against a log,
engrossed in a paperback, smoking a Lark
and tugging absentmindedly
her swimsuit's oily strap.

Our minor wounds stung by dried salt, we were surprised
how far the kelp had been dragged up,
left like silage from a great combine.
Crows hawked in the Douglas firs,
their inland world dense and inaccessible,

so I and the other children stayed on the open beach,
towheaded, curious, and bored.
Some rocks we could overturn, and there
we subjugated neighborhoods of tiny crabs
who scampered from the light.

Between our playing and the woods
the bones of old trees bleached by the Sound
were heaped as if in the aftermath of battle.
I crawled inside a rack of driftwood,
pretending it was home.

By now, insinuating tides have tugged it apart.
Mrs. Pocket finished her book, and sometime later
died of cancer. Her daughters have grown up,
no longer the crabs' tormentors.
We've all been changed,

drifting into new configurations
and seldom taking time to watch the light.
But we remember boredom,
the pleasure of letting says go nowhere
till something called us home.

--David Mason (1954- ), American poet and librettist, poet laureate of Colorado, 2010.

[little tree]

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look the spangle
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see 
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands 
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing 
"Noel Noel"

--e. e. cummings (1894-1963), American poet

Spring and Fall

to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
No mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, English Jesuit priest and poet

A Child's Thought of God

They say that God lives very high;
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God; and why?

And if you dig down in the mines,
You never see Him in the gold,
Though from Him all that’s glory shines.

God is so good, He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across His face,
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

But still I feel that His embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place;

As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses’ pressure,
Half waking me at night, and said,
“Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?”

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), English Romantic poet and Christian

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

--Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), American, from Collected Poems, 1942