A Guest poem for summer

On July 4, weather permitting, four children--one baby, a 1-year-old, a toddler and a grown-up 4-year-old--will grace my back yard with their parents, their parents' parents, aunts and uncles and cousins galore. Anticipating that, here is a summer poem by Edgar A. Guest pulled from Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest, published by The Reilly & Lee Co. of Chicago in 1934.
This poem is for the children. All children.

THE SUMMER CHILDREN

 

I like 'em in the winter when their cheeks are slightly pale,

I like 'em in the spring time when the March winds blow a gale;

But when summer suns have tanned 'em and they're racing to and fro,

I somehow think the children make the finest sort of show.

 

When they're brown as little berries and they're bare of foot and head,

And they're on the go each minute where the velvet lawns are spread,

Then their health is at its finest and they never stop to rest,

Oh, it's then I think the children look and are their very best.

 

We've got to know the winter and we've got to know the spring,

But for children, could I do it, unto summer I would cling;

For I'm happiest when I see 'em, as a wild and merry band

Of healthy, lusty youngsters that the summer sun has tanned.

 

 



Google images

 



Blogging about some scenes and such - poems

Pears are ripening - PL

 

TANKA

 

recorded giggles

from the nearby carnival

echo braggart's joke--

   "I'll eat more crawfish than you--

   take that trophy to Texas."

[news photo, 6.16.'97]

 

~~

 

CINQUAIN

"Typhoon Season"

 

Who owns

Scarborough Shoals

in the south China sea--

China? the Philippines? Both pull

their ships.

[J. Perlez, NYT, 6.19.'12]

~~

 

TANKA

 

wheelbarrow

going places without

leaving home

   it also fits the contours

   of my tired body

[Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 6.17. '07]

~~

 

CINQUAIN

"Jennings Osbourne"

 

He looked

at everything

the same, whether it cost

twenty-thousand dollars or just

two bucks.

[David Koon, AR Times, 6.16.'12]

~~

 

TANKA

 

looking up

from my reading, I see

the red mandevilla

highlighted by morning's sun

and swaying in a slight breeze

[actual, 5. 16. '12]

~~

 

CINQUAIN

 

Beside

I-95,

a man holds a woman

tenderly next to their auto

nearby.

[actual, South Carolina, 6. 27. '10]

Floods and their aftermath--poems

Google Images

 

 

after the flood

yard full of photos

drying out

~~

 

black sodden fields--

slender streams snake through

toward the river

~~

 

the flood

taking his seventy-year

collection of treasures

~~

 

new torrents in flooded town:

    tears of the victims

    viewing their losses

~~

 

82-year-old's

jet ski of no use now

the rising river

~~

 

family of ducks

s~w~i~m~m~i~n~g

the flooded street

~~

 

red mud

sucking at the worker's shoes

seven days of rain

~~

 

catching "zzz"s and rays

weary floodfighter

waits for more sandbags

~~

 

on the fire escape

a man in suit and top hat

signals for rescue

~~

~~

 

c 2015 Pat Laster dba lovepat press



My first sonnet

Photo: Sister Carolyn Hoggard

I SOUGHT YOU LONG, O LOVE

 

Through mocking, taunting games of hide-and-seek,

you torture and delay. A challenged sleuth,

I search in crannies--vertical, oblique--

for angles, images. Like savage youth,

I rip apart the weedy, matted clumps

of phrases adequate another time.

Your shadow leads me further, over humps

of clichés, scrabbling for a word sublime.

Perhaps my efforts trample fragile seed.

Oh, accents, meter, rhyme, emerge now from

your hiding place. Give up. No more impede

my crazed, frenetic goal to pen a psalm.

   The chase was long--through bramble, thicket, thorn.

   The prize is won: a sonnet newly born.

 

--PL, from variations, 1994