Poems from my childhood

Today I decided to include three poems I wrote as an elementary school aged child, before I had that crushing awareness of myself as a separate entity whose creations made a statement about her value to the rest of the world. I miss being in a state of mind where it never could occur to me that my checking out the (same) best book of children's poems from our school library week after week after week, or escaping to our driveway to write my way through spiral notebooks meant anything.


This first one is from third grade. We had just finished a lesson in Haiku, and we went off to sit on the lawn, write Haiku, and share in small groups. (During this same exercise I wrote another one about a waterfall, but I have since forgotten that one).




Roses


Bright bursts of colour
Against the swirling blue sky
Hear the silent song




Two things about this poem. First, my mother and grandmother always kept huge, famous (to me) rose gardens. I spent a lot of time there smelling the roses, stealing their petals to fling into the air, and, later, when two eucalyptus trees starting growing at the bottom of the hill in our yard, I learned how to make potpourri from the leaves and rose petals. These rose bushes were deserving of an anthem. Second, I must have read a lot of English verse as a child, because I always spelled "color" as "c-o-l-o-u-r." It actually took my conscious effort to begin spelling the word the using the usual American spelling.


The next two poems were written outside of school for a fifth grade event the fifth grade class held every year called the "Author's Tea." On one afternoon, we spent the whole rest of the day after lunch sitting in a circle, eating treats each student brought, and listening to each other read poems and stories we'd written throughout the year. I think the "winner" of the day was a story by a girl in the class named Kelly about a girl's mother in the hospital-- she didn't make it. The room full of children and parents was silent until somebody asked if it was a true story, and Kelly laughed and said no. Here are the two poems I read that day-




A Wonderful Day


I ran through fields with skies of blue,
My feet were wet with drops of dew,
My heart went wild with the beauty of Spring,
Today Mother Earth decided to sing,
And then I lay down in a pile of hay,
And think to myself, what a wonderful day.




My jumpy verb tense and confusion of "lay" and "lie" are almost cute. What I remember about writing this poem is that this is an entirely fictional day. I never ran through any such fields barefoot in the morning and then rested contentedly in any barn. But the image of all those places and things, and the experience of all those events were salient, were real, in my mind.


The second poem I read that day was about moving on to middle school- a new school with new kids to meet and understand.




Farewell


Farewell to all I used to know,
Fate has called, it's time to go,
My mind keeps saying it can't be so,
But soon I'll have to go.