The Night

We interrupt this series on the "problem" of animal death to bring you (in response to public demand) another poem by my youngest daughter, Willow. This one she wrote a year ago (as a 9-year-old), and the last line is telling.

The evening is cool, the moonlight is bright.
The owls are calling all through the night.

While children are sleeping, each snug in her bed,
here come the stars, marching ahead.

Some creatures are moving all through the night,
while others are sleeping, waiting for light.

Down goes the moon, up comes the sun.
Here come the children, ready to run.

Genovia Pear

It is my pleasure at this time and place to debut a brand new poem by my youngest daughter, Willow, age 10. It's called "Genovia Pear."

I sit on a bench in the cool morning air
Next to a tree called Genovia Pear.
I reach for a pear so high in the tree,
I fall to the ground and hurt my right knee.

An April Day

It's that weather where, if you're working outside, one minute you get nice and warm in the sunshine and the next it's cloudy and windy. You end up taking a sweatshirt off and then ten minutes later putting it back on and wishing you had a windbreaker. This sort of day was captured well by Robert Frost in a stanza from one of my favorite poems, "Two Tramps in Mud-Time"...

The sun was out but the wind was chill,
You know how it is on an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
you're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
a wind comes off of a snowy peak,
and you're two months back in the middle of March.