A Wink and a Nod
There's a book tucked into my bookshelf where I jot down poems I like. It's a small book, so only short poems fit onto the pages. Flipping through the book today, I found that Emily Dickinson takes up her fair share of the book. The "Beat Eater" poem by Gwendolyn Brooks from yesterday's entry is there, too. I noticed for the first time today that several of the poems are by Jack Prelutsky, I poet who's name I never read in graduate school. Even though I added the poems to my notebook, I can't recall where I found them, whether I found them all at ounce, or if I tripped over them one at a time while searching the Internet or reading at the library. Prelutsky writes poems for kids, and the ones I've collected are short and fun. Just the right note to add between a couple of Emily Dickinson's. Here's a sampling:

My baby brother is so small
He hasn't even learned to crawl
He's only been around a week,
And all he does is bawl.
Waah!
And wiggle.
Sleep.
And leak.


My sister ate an orange.
I'm astonished that she did.
She swallowed it completely.
She's a disconcerting kid.
My sister ate an orange.
First she chewed it for a while,
Then digested it entirely
With a silly sort of smile.
My sister ate an orange.
It's a novel thing to do.
Then she also ate a yellow
And a purple and a blue.


It was a sound,
An awful sound,
A sound both sharp and flat.
And high and low and screechy
Like the shrieking of a cat.
Meeow!
It was a scratchy,
Scrapey sound.
It sand into my skin.
That sound my sister made today,
She plays the violin.

[This is a poem all the Prairie Tide sisters can relate to.]


- posted by Laurie @ 3:08 PM