Susan's Thursday morning note June 15, 2023
Children's Poetry Collected by Caroline Kennedy in A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children
Poems on evening/early morning hours
Good morning! Silence except the sound of clicking from the keyboard. Steam from my mug the only movement in the room. Stillness. The silence that only early morning gives. The gift only for a few moments where the world hasn’t fully awakened. My angel quietly peering through the window faithfully handing me her gift of today. Her gift of another morning. Morning thoughts seem more hopeful than evening thoughts. The sounds are cheerful with the birds rather than the sadness from the crickets. Little lump of gold still asleep calms me. Flowers still closed. All so still. No ants are even scurrying yet to work on their mounds. The moments of peace.
I have reopened a children’s book of poetry compiled by Caroline Kennedy. A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children. The illustrations are beautiful watercolors that are worthy of their own book. I am going to give you her favorite poems on the late evening/early morning hours. They are beautiful. I hope they enter your mind as your begin your day. Giving us words that slow our minds. That give us mental pictures. That show us there are certain hours within the evening/night/morning to look differently on our world and think more clearly.
The Early Morning by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
The moon on one hand, the dawn on the other:
The moon is my sister; the dawn is my brother.
The moon on my left hand and the dawn on my right.
My brother, good morning: my sister, good night.
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
by Wallace Stevens (1875-1955, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry)
The house was quiet and the world was calm
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Poetry. Just that word shows a certain peace given to us through print. How I love books. How I love the books you’re bringing into our store for me to get the first chance to look through and unpack. Treasures. One of my main reasons to desire entering the store. I never lose the expectation of finding a new author that will change the rest of my life.
The summer night is like a perfection of thought. I love that line. Can we use these seemingly endless hot days to be our time for thoughts? For giving ourselves time to think? To dream? To hope? Can we use the endless hours that can easily become something we would define as boring? Can we mentally choose to use those hours as a gift? A gift to find thoughts worthy of thinking? Dreams that we can have the courage to pursue? I’ve read the analogy of the quiet times being rests in music. We don’t have to fill the rests.
Have a beautiful end of the week. Thank you for letting me again enter your Thursday. Tonight we have the chance to write in stone our epitaph for the moments today we won’t be able to get back. Will we discipline our moments to be worthy of imprint? Will we look into eyes of those we care about? Of those we don’t know? Will we notice the open flower before the others open? Will we notice the changes in our friends and children? Will we take the time to not only think of ourselves, but make a conscious effort to know those we love? Time. So short….the winds blow…time…I can never tell you what your business & encouragement & friendship means. Susan
Make no small plans for they have no power to stir the soul. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Someone with their feet planted firmly on the ground has no hope of reaching the stars. Kelsey Dunn
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
One can never consent to creep when one feels the compulsion to soar. Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Latin for this week:
mane - early morning, early in the morning
Aurora, diluculo - dawn
lucubrare - study or composition lasting late into the night
vesper - evening
Works Cited:
Kennedy, Caroline. A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children. New York. Hyperion. 2005.