xtcian

'cause weird lover wilde is on mine

2/16/09

Oh, I had some choice foul-mouthed invective to lay on you today, but while I was away for the weekend, Tessa called me to say Lucy had written her first poem.

"Her first WHAT?" I said. Then I prepared myself for rhymes, and for the subject to be completely nonsensical. Instead, Tessa forwarded me this:

El Bosque Roto

a broken forest
here's the rain going back to the sky
it's spring
there are blossoms on the trees
and milk

So, of course, I'm just lying on my bed with tears welling up in my eyes - which might have been caused by Ty Lawson's last shot over Miami, but probably a combination of the two. Then my brother Kent put this up on his new blog:

a broken forest

here's the rain going back to the sky

it's spring

there are blossoms on the trees

and milk

I swear to god, my family does me in sometimes. Apparently the process is this: Lucy draws the picture with markers and narrates while Tessa transcribes, in her words "sort of like Yeats doing the 'automatic writing' with his wife." Pauses become line breaks, and there you have it.

When I got home tonight, there was another poem waiting, another little accidental Rilkean rain gem from my 3 and 3/4-year-old. I try not to get overcome with preciousness, and the day will come when she'll temporarily be more chained to the rigidity of structure and grade-school narrative - but for now, we get this:

that's nothing
just the world warming up
the sky is coming blue
there's no more rain
now I need the sun
the flowers can't get tired.