Photo 44/365

Some poetry just speaks to you...

From I Don't Want to Be Demure or Respectable by Mary Oliver

Spring poems, by Calvin

The sun comes out, 
Its heat penetrates the snow
To the grassy layer below,
The clouds grow thin,
A blue sky beind,
Spring has sprung anew.
 

The springing spring is bouncing in,
With birds and foxes alike,
It fills the winter white with warm,
And melts the snow to slush,
And takes its place where spring should go,
With flowers and grasses alike.
 

Spring wakes up,
Pushes aside its bedcovers,
Rambling out of bed,
Into its dayclothes it goes oncemore,
Never to sleep for three months,
Goodbye winter, hello spring! 
 

Gathering Leaves

I think I've written about this poem before, but it's meaning is more particular now. Part of Calvin's grammar study is memorizing poems. He memorizes one every month of so, per the recommendations of A Well Trained Mind. Or, actually, that is where the original impetus arose, but now we do it because we enjoy poetry...and because of days like this. We spent a good hour outside this afternoon in a weak but warm afternoon sun trying to rake leaves in a blustery wind. And we did it reciting poetry. Mainly Robert Frost, but a little Coleridge and Keats as well. Leaves, and friends, and snowy woods, nightingales and things of beauty. These are the real reasons we memorize, and recite, poetry together.

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and dear
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed, 
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight, 
And since they grew duller
From contact with Earth,
Next to Nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop, 
And who's to say where
This harvest shall stop?

--Robert Frost

Roads Go Ever On (poem by J. R. R. Tolkien)

Day abbreviated

It's a Monday, following a long, though enjoyable, weekend. We got less sleep than usual on Friday night. We got less sleep than usual on Saturday night. We went to bed a little later we should have on Sunday night. There were moments today when one or both of us (probably all of us) were looking a little glassy eyed. Days like today deserve to be abbreviated. Days like today, when they happen in winter, deserve hot chocolate, snuggly blankets, good books, nap time. We did all of the above. We also did the laundry, built with Legos, spent 20 minutes locked in a dark closet with an array of flashlights, practiced drawing trees, explored water colors, and started our own illustrated version of Robert Frost's A Prayer in Spring (wishful thinking).

A Prayer in Spring
by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.