Several of you at Wednesdays@One have already begun sending me your poems about children, so I can tell this is a project that piques your interest. After all, everybody has kids and grandkids, right, and is proud of them? Well, maybe not everybody. I don't, for instance. But that's another matter.
The project at hand is to write a poem for, to or about a child. I imagine at least some of you plan on celebrating your own kids or grandkids in poetry. Fine. Only, please try to avoid sentimentalizing. We're about poetry here--making art--not greeting cards.
I haven't read any of the poems you've shared yet, but I'm guessing you've just been caught with your hand in the Sentimental Cookie Jar. To help you extract it, perhaps with a rewrite or two, here are some more and less famous examples of poems about, to, for children or young adults . . .
On My First Daughter
--Ben Johnson, 1616
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months' end she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath place amongst her virgin-train:
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
from The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers
--Andrew Marvell, 1681
See with what simplicity
This nymph begins her golden days!
In the green grass she loves to lie,
And there with her fair aspect tames
The wilder flowers and gives them names,
But only with the roses plays,
And them does tell
What color best becomes them and what smell.
. . .
But O, young beauty of the woods,
Whom Nature courts with fruit and flowers,
Gather the flowers but spare the buds,
Lest Flora, angry at thy crime
To kill her infants in their prime,
Do quickly make th' example yours;
And ere we see,
Nip in the blossom all our hopes and desires.
The Chimney Sweeper
--William Blake, 1794
A little black thing among the snow
Crying "'weep, 'weep," in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father & mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray,
"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winter's snow;
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
"And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
Spring and Fall
--Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah, but 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.
Sorrow's Springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no, nor mind express'd
What heart heard of, ghost guessed.
It is the blight Man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
-- Dylan Thomas, 1937
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Out, Out--
-- Robert Frost, 1916
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them 'Supper,' At the word, the saw,
As if to prove that saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--,
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off--
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Sara in Her Father's Arms
-- George Oppen, 1962
Cell by cell the baby made herself, the cells
Made cells. That is to say
The baby is made largely of milk. Lying in her father's arms,
the little seed eyes
Moving, trying to see, smiling for us
To see, she will make a household
To her need of these rooms--Sara, little seed,
Little violent, diligent seed. Come let us look at the world
Glittering: this seed will speak,
Max, words! There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak. What will she make of a world,
Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made.
from The Bath
-- Gary Snyder, 1972
Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
"Gary don't soap my hair!"
--his eye-sting fear--
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the globes and curves of his body,
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,
is this our body?
We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper
-- Michael S. Harper, 1970
We assume
that in 28 hours,
lived in a collapsible isolette,
you learned to accept pure oxygen
as the natural sky;
the scant shallow breaths
that filled those hours
cannot, did not make you fly--
but dreams were there
like crooked palmprints on
the twin-think windows of the nursery--
in the glands of your mother.
We assume
the sterile hands
drank chemicals in and out
from lungs opaque with mucus,
pumped your stomach,
eeked the bicarbonate in
crooked, green-winged veins,
out in a plastic mask;
A woman who'd lost her first son
consoled us with an angel gone ahead
to pray for our family--
gone into that sky
seeking oxygen,
gone into autopsy,
a fine brown powdered sugar,
a disposable cremation:
We assume
you did not know we loved you.
Child Bride
-- Caroline Bird, 2006
Peel that scab off your knee,
pass me a piece of mud pie,
slurp me a soggy kiss
and lie down on the road,
I'll run you down with my tricycle,
we'll drink undiluted orange squash.
Put this chewing gum in your hair.
Let's make a potion,
I'll put some leaves in the blender,
can I read your diary?
Let's put pencils in our ears,
throw stones at a wall,
climb onto the roof of the greenhouse.
Can I see your underwear?
Let's pretend I'm a doctor.
You can bite me if you like,
you can share my crisps.
Peel that scab off your knee,
pass me a piece of mud pie,
let's pretend to make a cup of tea,
would you like to marry me?
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