Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Bed as world


My grandson’s pleasure
is to sit on the bed
under a sheet
teepeed by his head
while I lie next to him
and read. As if the sheet
has just fallen
from a high mountain,
the entire snow-cap
intact, and now he is
the mountain and I am
the foothills at his knee,
sending echoes up
to his head, the peak,
my voice a yodler’s calling
or a squirrel's clicking
or a bear's bellowing
or a train's chug-chugging
or a bell's ding-donging
across a deep valley
where children behind
gaping glassless windows
are falling asleep in the clean
cool down of their beds,
all around them
puffing complexities 
of another world.





24 comments:

  1. Oh, for the imagination of a child!! (Tabula rasa!) If only we could keep some of this wonder as adults. This is an awesome, wonderful, fresh write. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I taught my two daughters to read under the covers with a small flashlight at a young age...especially the mystery books. And I read to them religiously...we all cried through the ending of "Old Yeller"...so much that we had to pass the book around to whichever of us was crying the least to finish it. They're both avid readers (and school teachers) and my three grandchildren are bookaholics, too. My job is done...I'm surrounded by readers and book lovers. Thank you for sharing this---love the imagery. xo

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    1. Marion, thank you very much for depositing your inspiring story here. I love it all! And thank you for nice things said about the poem. I am supremely grateful for my grandson (and the ones to come) for living my childhood over, which frankly wasn't all that luminous first time 'round. :)

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  2. Very nice, Ruth. Soon, you will have three times the mountains, three times the foothills, and three times the "puffing complexities of another world."

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  3. Bliss of course! What joy it is to enter the unspoiled world of the child.
    And I like you yodeling and clicking and ding-dinging. As for the voice of the BIGGEST Billy Goat Gruff. How challenging that is to manage.
    You have captured the magic beautifully. One sadly thinks of Wordsworth's 'shades of the prison house......". Such a world of delights.
    I never realized being a grandparent would be quite so exciting.

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    1. Dear Elizabeth, you and I share this great delight in grandchildren, and I'm so grateful when I see yours on Instagram. Thank you for the deeply moving and perfect reference to Wordsworth's poem, which I had never read straight through. (Intimations of Immortality

      The ending lines:

      The clouds that gather round the setting sun
      Do take a sober colouring from an eye
      That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
      Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
      Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
      Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
      To me the meanest flower that blows can give
      Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

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  4. The Land of Counterpane, as Robert Louis Stevenson called it. Beautiful!

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    1. Robert, thanks for this. I had not read his poem. I love it!

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  5. Every boy should be so lucky to have a poet for a grandmother.

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    1. Thanks, Maureen, and every grandmother should be so lucky to have a James.

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  6. How lovely, Ruth. I do think your grands must be the luckiest in the world. Yes, I do!

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    1. Jeanie, thank you so much, but I am the lucky one!!

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  7. Utterly beautiful innocent imagery of your own imagining, still so fresh! "Sending echoes up to his head, the peak..." My heart leaped at this! We should sit with young children more often I think... How wonderful to experience this imagery you sing to us, of wonder, simplicity and innocence - "puffing complexities of another world." I am utterly verklempt!

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    1. Christine, many thanks for connecting with leaps and verklemption! How wonderful when this happens. xo

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  8. Your voice reading to him under the mountain wil forever be in his heart (and yours). Beautiful.

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    1. Mary, I hope you are right. They might move far away this year, depending on where Brian gets a tenure job. I can hardly bear to think about it. But I long for his daddy to get a more permanent position, too. Thank you.

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  9. Oh-Oh-Oh. This is glorious in every way, Sister. I especially like what George said! Soon!

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    1. Thank you, Boots. I am in a whirlpool of simultaneous tension and joy. :)

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  10. I think every child experiences the youth of the species- I see this enrapt listener in a firelit cave, hearing the tales, imprinted with an oral literature that is more about becoming enkindled with a love of imaginative language. Why else do we speak but to travel to far places, whether that be Lascaux or another child's house or lips just beyond our own. And the pleasure of the storyteller (and the speaker of this poem) lies in the gift of return to childhood through the gift of giving it to another. Amen.

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    1. Brendan, very beautifully expressed, and deeply felt by us in epic proportions. Thank you.

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  11. Oh, lucky James! Oh, lucky you! How joyful it is to read to children and how well you have captured the wonder of the experience beneath that teepeed sheet a circle closed and intimate, and open and vast as the mountains and valleys your imaginations travel. And you will soon have 2 more to share this experience : )

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    1. DS, maybe you're the most joyous person I know, since you read to children often. xo

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  12. I'm so glad for your encouraging wonderment in little JL....methinks that that image of the head-propped tent will never disappear from your memory....

    I'm reminded of a night long ago when I started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to David when suddenly he commanded "STOP! Do you see that picture in your head?"

    You are opening JL's heart. The world is in good hands.

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    1. Nelson, the imagery you've given in your small comment box is as big as a world. I love it all, and I thank you.

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All responses are welcome.