Today's Poem - Thursday

So, we missed a day yesterday - no poem of the day for Wed. The kids are in back-to-school mode, and between meeting new teachers, getting new sneakers, and a few last minute summer adventures, we forgot to read our daily poem yesterday.

But no matter, because today was a new day, a new day ready to march forward with our preschool poetry curriculum. The hands-down favorite poem so far has been Emily Dickinson's I'm Nobody. Magpie must recite it two or three times a day - emphasis on the shhh, don't tell anyone they'll vanish us! which clearly is an improvement on the original ...banish us. So I decided to give the people what they want, and read them one of Em-D's oldest standards:

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,--
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

This poem was another clear winner, with both girls really enjoying acting out the poem, and there was also the added benefit of being able to work in an etiquette lesson in Line 8, when we demonstrated how the bird ...hopped sideways to the wall/to let a bettle pass. I'm guessing that bird does not live in New York City!!!!! :) LOL!!

Today's Poem - Friday

I just realized that the last three (also the only three) Poems of the Day are all New England poetesses, so I thought I should branch out for Today's Poem. I was also thinking that so far these are all poems I already know and love, and that it would be nice to find a poem not only new to the girls but also new for me, too.

I hunted around a bit and found one that I think will be perfect, DH Lawrence's Suburbs on a Hazy Day. It makes the suburbs sound like the boring cesspools they are, which is perfect because lately Magpie has been campaigning that she wants to live in the 'burbs (because a lot of her friends have moved there and in her four-year-old world "the suburbs" are probably imagined as some purple-hued pony pastured magic play land) and this poem should paint the more realistic cookie-cutter wasteland which would await her there in reality. (Spoiler alert: a year later we do move to the suburbs. Lucky us!)

Suburbs on a Hazy Day

O stiffly shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror’s cloth was thrown across you, and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased?

Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong aqua regia now are you steeped?

That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible taint!