The last step in my 2yo’s goodnight routine is that I read her an A.A. Milne poem; tonight I couldn’t find the book and she was almost asleep but demanding More Po-emmm and I panicked and recited Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”
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You need to understand: thanks to school I’ve memorized literally hundreds of poems, and yet my brain was like “hey dipshit the only thing we choose to remember rn begins They fuck you up, your mom and dad / they may not mean to, but they do”
Nooo... You didn't. Let the 2yo be a 2yo. "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.' I don't think I learned this until I was 10.
She may grow up to be the kind of kid who calls you in the middle of the afternoon some fall weekday of her first semester away and ask for a poem because she's just a tad homesick (my Dad offered Jonathan Jo and his wheelbarrow full of surprises, word perfect, and I still remember 15 years later).
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*cause them to politely back away & try to find the grownups in the room
And then forgot to tell us why.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
One end is moo, the other, milk
I'm not sellyfish.
Maybe pages and pages and pages from The Choices of Master Samwise or The Battle of the Pelennor Fields would put a kid to sleep?
Probably I'm not cut out to be a parent.
I just got this one, from Ernest Shepherd's art for THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS: