No, not the baby. It’s the new Carnival of Children’s Literature, brought to us with poetic flair by Sherry of Semicolon. I for one cannot wait to spend some time exploring this cavalcade of poetry-themed posts. Bravo!
Tags: children’s literature, kidlit, children’s books, books, picture books, poetry
Because of posts like this. Go feast yourselves on her poetry links!
We can’t stay inside.
The crocuses are gone, and the daffodils are just barely past their peak. The grape hyacinths are up, and lots of our neighbors seem to have gone in for the breathtaking pairing of these sweet blue fairy-bulbs and the sunny, amiable daffies. The combination is the epitome of cheerfulness, and I can’t get enough of it.
Last winter’s pansies have returned to wave like brilliant orange and blue flags in the April breezes, enlivening the sparse brown flowerbeds where the perennials are just beginning to shake themselves awake. I always love to see the re-emergence of my yarrow, for its feathery, gray-green foliage is exactly the color of spring according to my Secret Garden-trained sensibilities.
And our strawberries! We were astonished yesterday to see that they are already blooming. Dozens and dozens of the delicate white blossoms embroidered with yellow-green, like something off an old-fashioned sampler. We’ll be feasting by early June, for sure.
I am pointedly overlooking all the weeds. I cannot possibly uproot them now—as it is, I seem to be giving the neighbors panic attacks when they see me out in the mulch hacking down last year’s dead flowerstalks. No, I assure them, I am not trying to jumpstart labor; it’s just that if I don’t do it now, it won’t get done, right? I may be a baby-sling enthusiast, but tackling early spring garden cleanup tasks while toting a brand-new newborn—that’s a bit beyond me. So the gang and I got out there yesterday and chopped out all the brush. Now we can relax and enjoy watching the plantain and thistle columbines and shasta daisies emerge.
No trace yet of the milkweed Jane is raising to lure her monarchs. And we still haven’t planted our peas!
Tags: spring, nature study
There it was I saw what I shall never forget
And never retrieve.
Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe,
He lay, yet there he lay,
Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft small ebony hoves,
The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.
Surely his mother had never said, “Lie here
Till I return,” so spotty and plain to see
On the green moss lay he.
His eyes had opened; he considered me.
I would have given more than I care to say
To thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend
One moment only of that forest day:
Might I have had the acceptance, not the love
Of those clear eyes;
Might I have been for him in the bough above
Or the root beneath his forest bed,
A part of the forest, seen without surprise.
Was it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he depart
That jerked him to his jointy knees,
And sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling
On his new legs, between the stems of the white trees?