In the morning when the sun
Is shining down on everyone
How strange to see a daytime moon
Floating like a pale balloon
Over house and barn and tree
Without one star for company.
~Dorothy Aldis
I love this poem. In fact, I loved it so much I set it to music when the sweet girl was a baby. I still have lovely memories of holding my chubby infant on my lap and crooning out the words; then later, when she reached toddler/preschool age, seeing her light up when I would sing it and hearing her begin to sing it too.
I still love this poem, but today it cracked me up. Or to be more precise, the sweet girl cracked me up. If I needed any more persuading that my seven year old has arrived firmly at the "grammar" stage of learning (the delight in facts stage, the "reality testing" stage) I need it no more.
When we left for camp this morning, the sky was a bright, vivid blue spread like a smooth canopy over the river valley. Not a cloud to be seen everywhere, but one pale white balloon of a waning gibbous moon right overhead as we walked.
"Look, Mommy, a day-time moon!" the sweet girl exclaimed, which is always cause for me to launch into the song. Which I did.
And my little girl paused thoughtfully. "I wonder why you can't see other stars in the day-time like you sometimes can the moon," she mused (sending my poetry mind reeling in the direction of Wendell Berry's "day-blind stars").
Then she added, "and why does she say 'without one star for company'? The sun IS a star, so the moon does have a star for company!"
Hmm. Good point. I suggested that perhaps the poet meant no other stars, but that the line worked best for the poem here. But my "just the facts" girl said "yes, but maybe she just didn't KNOW the sun was a star."
Of course the last time we read Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar, that pillar of her toddler imagination, it also drove her buggy (pun intended) that Carle said cocoon instead of chrysalis.
Welcome to grammar land!
2 comments:
Very good point! I don't know if I would've thought of that. It sounds like you have a budding scientist on your hands! Or linguist perhaps. :) That's really neat that you set that poem to music. What a cool way to share it!
S. loves science and word play too! And she definitely keeps me on my toes.
I don't write music, so I never actually had a way to write down this (or some other songs I wrote when S. was a baby) but I still know their tunes. I've "put to music" a number of poems, some of them original. Sometimes I wish I had a way to record them just because I suspect I may forget them as the years pass and I sing them less frequently. Many of them are lullaby-ish!
On only a slightly related note, I've been wishing for one of those old-fashioned tape recorders lately -- the ones the size and shape of shoe boxes, like we had when I was a kid. I'd love for S. to be able to record herself in spelling and poetry reciting. But those things are hard to find!
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