{"id":330,"date":"2006-11-24T11:26:55","date_gmt":"2006-11-24T16:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=330"},"modified":"2006-11-24T21:57:24","modified_gmt":"2006-11-25T02:57:24","slug":"poetry-friday-nostalgic-for-the-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=330","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Friday: Nostalgic for the Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"

*{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is at A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy<\/a><\/strong>} . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Hello, Dear Readers.\u00a0 Happy day-after-Thanksgiving.\u00a0 Did you all make it through okay?\u00a0 Personally, I’m having trouble reaching past my tummy to the keyboard, but I’m okay with that.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking this morning about Thanksgiving, and its place in the Fall-to-Winter holiday continuum.\u00a0 Julie was right, it is<\/em> a very nice holiday<\/a><\/strong>, all about taking time to recognize what’s most important to us – family, friends, and the pleasures of home and hearth.\u00a0 I think it’s become a way to galvanize us, too, for the uberstressful capital-H-Holiday season.\u00a0 In a few weeks, when we’ve been fighting crowds in malls and standing in checkout lines for\u00a0days on the quest to get exactly the right gifts for those we care about, we can look back on Thanksgiving, remember being surrounded by those very same loved ones, maybe eating a fabulous pecan pie baked by the very relative whose name\u00a0we are currently cursing because she is so very hard to shop for – and take a breath, and remember why we’re putting\u00a0ourselves through this, why we do it over and over again every year:\u00a0 love.<\/p>\n

I may only be thinking in these terms because my husband and I didn’t go home this Thanksgiving.\u00a0 We live literally a thousand miles away from our extended families, and just don’t make it to Tennessee\u00a0for every holiday.\u00a0 We still cooked up a big meal, though, and we made the dishes that remind us of home.\u00a0 (Okay, so we bought the pecan pie.\u00a0 I can’t do it as well as my mom, but Whole Foods is pretty close.)\u00a0 So I’m feeling very nostalgic right now.\u00a0 And that may be why, when I went to my pile of Cybil Poetry nominees to choose one to write about, I was drawn to the Barefoot Book of Classic Poems<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, compiled and illustrated by Jackie Morris<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Barefoot<\/p>\n

If I were stranded on a desert island and could only take one book of poetry with me, this would not be a bad choice at all.\u00a0 Many of the greats are represented:\u00a0 Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Rilke…\u00a0 If you have a favorite, he\/she is probably here.\u00a0 This is, technically, being published and marketed for children, but few of the poems were actually written for children.\u00a0 Which is kind of great, actually – it’s an anthology that children can grow into.\u00a0 Poetry can\u00a0follow the same learning curve\u00a0as nursery rhymes: first you fall in love with the rhythm and rhyme, the sound of the language, long before you understand the meaning.<\/p>\n

The 74 poems – covering such themes as childhood, seasons, nature, animals, war, love and death –\u00a0are loosely arranged to “trace our journey through life from birth to old age” (from the publisher’s website<\/a><\/strong>).\u00a0 And they\u00a0have been selected and\u00a0beautifully, lavishly illustrated by Jackie Morris<\/strong><\/a>, who has just become one of my favorite illustrators.\u00a0 Her lovely, swirly, richly-colored, romantic\u00a0watercolors remind me of Jane Ray<\/a><\/strong>, another favorite.\u00a0 Click here<\/a><\/strong> to see the spreads for the cover and “The Owl and the Pussycat,” plus one for “How Many Miles to Babylon” that didn’t make the final cut.<\/p>\n

I wanted to share one of the poems with you, but seriously, there are so many good ones here it was hard to choose.\u00a0 But this one seems like a nice post-Thanksgiving choice – quiet, restful, magical, contented…\u00a0 Here’s “Moonlit Apples” by John Drinkwater:<\/p>\n

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
\nAnd the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
\nApples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest of the poem here<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 And have a lovely holiday season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is at A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy} . . . Hello, Dear Readers.\u00a0 Happy day-after-Thanksgiving.\u00a0 Did you all make it through okay?\u00a0 Personally, I’m having trouble reaching past my tummy to the keyboard, but I’m okay with that. I’ve been thinking this morning about Thanksgiving, and its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}