Friday, April 20, 2012

A Book and a Chair: Two Original Poems about Reading to Young Children



I must apologize for being AWOL from Blue Rose Girls for so long. Although I may be retired, my new “nanny granny” schedule keeps me really busy. I leave my house every Monday afternoon and don’t return until Thursday evening. I have also been working on the final revisions for my Things to Do poetry collection—which will be published by Chronicle Books.

I’m finding I have much less time for blogging than I had in the past. I am, however, hoping to find more time for blogging in the future. I have made a real effort to post more often at Wild Rose Reader during National Poetry Month. And because this is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d post two original poems.

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Many years ago, I wrote the following poem titled A Book and a Chair about reading to my daughter when she was little:


A BOOK AND A CHAIR

A book and chair
Are nice to share
When the edges of day
Are melting away
Into the night.

A book and a chair
Are nice to share—
Touching and talking,
Reading and rocking
Into the night.

These days I’m having fun reading to my granddaughter Julia Anna. Although Julia still likes to chew on books, she is now eight-months-old and is beginning to understand books better.



A couple of months ago,  my daughter snapped a picture of me reading to Julia before she headed off to work one morning. Julia and I were reading Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.


The picture inspired me to wrote the following poem:

A Book and a Chair
(For Julia)

A book and a chair
Are nice to share
When dawn wakes the sun
And morning’s begun.

A book and a chair
Are nice to share
When I am with you
And the day is brand new.

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Over at Wild Rose Reader, I have an original poem titled Things to Do If You Are a Nightlight. It was one of the poems that we cut from my Things to Do poetry collection.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Random Noodling.

5 comments:

Diane Mayr said...

OMG--love those polka-dotted pajamas!

Jeannine Atkins said...

Oh, my goodness! Upcoming book (exciting) and grandmotherhood are enough to excuse waning blogging, but these photos could forgive anything! Thank you all for the smiles!

jama said...

Swooning over the polka dots too! SO adorable. I LOVE polka dots!

The poems are wonderful. :)

Ruth said...

Those photos bring back so many happy memories with reading to my babies! Enjoy! :-)

Anna Alter said...

Glad to see you back Elaine, we missed you (great pajamas)!