Tag Archives: simple poems

simple poems

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like a message in a bottle, or a time capsule i never intended to bury, i found these quotes waiting patiently in my drafts folder, and a quick search tells me i never published them. a little gift to me from my couple of years ago self, the electronic equivalent of scraps of paper found in a pocket. being a space cadet has its advantages.

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this morning when i was driving out our dirt road to bring quinn to school he told me, “you’re going too fast. go as slow as a heron when he’s walking.”

9-11-12

Copy of leaf

(there weren’t any pictures associated with the post yet, so i took the liberty of going back to the photos from around the dates on these quotes… also a fun trip down memory lane!)

camp trike 1 small

“look at those geese! they’re forming a moon!”

1-23-2013

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“this is the u.p.s. fishing boat, calling the u.s. coast guard, come in… we’re having a pelagic emergency!”

1-21-13

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“can we keep hearing the talking about exploring diabetes with owls?” quinn requesting to continue listening to terri gross’s fresh air interview with david sedaris because “i like the sound of his voice and what he’s saying.”

4-24-13

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“even the salmonberries have fairies tending them, mama. there are fairies tending every kind of plant that has food that we eat. and then, when we eat the salmonberries, the fairies tend us instead!”

6-17-13

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(about romper the chihuahua)”he’s running around so fast it’s like he’s water running through a pipe!”

8-8-13

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i hope your day brings you a gift just as sweet!

simple poems

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it’s been a long time since i posted some of these…

mama, you’re wearing your hair in a bun! it looks like a cimmanon bun, and i want to eat it!

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i was talking to my bff and quinn was wanting to interrupt, but then he snuggled in with me under a throw blanket. he then proceeded to gestate as a dinosaur egg, and after letting me finish talking, he began narrating the story while we listened to him. he was a triceratops egg, which at one point in the story was stolen by some pteranodons. dinosaur eggs, incidentally, are quovals; that is their shape. they are a lot like ovals, except an oval is just flat, so they are 3-dimensional ovals, or quovals. i asked why the pteranodons didn’t just eat something else instead of brand new triceratops hatchlings, but quinn said that unfortunately in their part of the rain forest, the only other available prey are monkeys, and pteranodons do not prefer to eat monkeys because of the furballs that develop in their stomachs after they eat them.

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quinn asked me about whether uncle b and uncle t (my brothers) were born before me or after me, and i told him that i am a girl sandwich, with one of each. he laughed and said, “and you’re the cheese, mama!” then he thought a little more, and said it would be even more awesome if “pan” was masculine and “queso” was feminine! (guess what he’s been learning in spanish class!)

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while eating pirate booty snacks: “look, this pirate booty is an ammonite!”

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can you put music on? my body is dying to dance.

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giving guinea pig presentation

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magically filling my car with 600 guinea pigs with his wizard staff

bonus simple poem on a found scrap of paper i apparently never posted….

“it feels good to me in here! i feel like i might explode with excitement, like i’m inside a box that’s full of pomegranates! with two mice!” quinn upon entering the dragon house the very first time, 1-7-12

here’s hoping the new dragon house has the same effect on him!

gems from the week

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0409131517

it’s been a very full week. not getting any less full today, though i have gotten through the clogged toilet, flat tire, and full day of developmental/neurological evaluation and i am still standing. ok i’m sitting. and i am still shaking a bit, but i will be alright and write more about all of that soon. (not the toilet. you know.)

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all of that to say, i have not had a chance to post this week and this won’t be much of a zinger either. but i did want to make sure and capture the one gem from the week i managed to remember, from a bob book reading session when quinn told me, “i can just read it to myself in unhearable talking!” have a good weekend, folks, and treat yourself to a nice book and some unhearable talking. i plan to do that tonight, in a hot bathtub, just as soon as i finish reading (in hearable talking) harry potter and the half blood prince and tucking in the little brilliant boy i love most.

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simple poems

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“over the sight

over the dreams

down in the wonderful

honey full

streams!”

-2-26-12

“from the redwood oceans… to the new york houses…. to the new york forests…”

~a saturday in april

“i can see the still-wets of the ants as they march across my tent.” (still-wets = silhouettes)

5-20-12

in salvation army, with a pair of brown leather baby flip flops in his hand, “i want to buy these, just in case someday i have a partner in my tummy…”

6-3-12

when asked if he enjoyed the dance performance of alice in wonderland: “yes, i liked it so much! it was like hundreds of toys, being painted out of a box!”

6-2-12

“i wish there was a spirit everywhere that made all of our wishes come true”

~7-30-12

simple poems

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mama, addressing sick boy while administering herbal remedies of some sort: “blah blah blah blah blah to help you heal.”

sniffly boy: “i like the word heal.”

10-30-11

“what is fire?”

10-30-11

“the letter E has 3 crossbars and 2 canoe cracks!”

11-4-11

“i’ve got tiger spirit helpers, sabre-toothed tiger spirit helpers, woolly mammoth spirit helpers, bear spirit helpers, and wolf spirit helpers.”

mama, thoroughly humbled: “wow! tell me more!”

more of the list: “owl, crab, sea lion, lingcod, salmon, greenling, and shark. squid and shrimp. deer and elk. mountain lion. porcupine. hawk and eagle and osprey and turkey vulture.”

mama: “any plants?”

quinn: “no.”

mama: “insects?”

quinn: “sure! spider, grasshopper, centipede, ladybug, earthworm, silkworm, glowworm, praying mantis, and rooster and chicken and ‘peasant’ and goblin friends.”

mama: “trees?”

quinn:”no.”

mama: “flowers?”

quinn: “no. but i’ve got cloud men spirit helpers….”

11-8-11

“what is marrying?”

mama: (some sort of answer i couldn’t possibly repeat since i had a hard enough time answering the first time around)

“oh… well, would you want to marry me then?”

11-12-11

“it’s just that the earth that we live on keeps turning round and round like a big bus wheel.”

11-17-11

(“reading” to me from creatures of the woods book) “the east american white-heiny’d elk lives in africa, 150 million miles away…

…the italian squirrel climbs up enormous trees all the way to the top and eats acorns!”

12-7-11

simple poems

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in your imagination…

a tree-trimming truck effortlessly becomes “a truck with a gi-hugic space mast!” ~10-2-11

“my first life was in alaska and i left my lights there…” ~10-5-11

(telling a story about quinn, bilbo, and the dwarves fighting smaug…)

“and as for quinn, his arms were gone, legs were gone, head was gone…. alll that was left of him was his belly button!”

~10-9-11

 

passing a big yellow bus…

“while i am four, i think that this (gesture indicating our car) can be my school bus.” ~10-17-11

  (can i confess that i secretly link this with his desire to stay four forever?)

simple poems and stories

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“once there were a lot of people that planted a lot of seeds in the buried heavier in the rocks of the jetty boulders and the trees grew up and grew branches and from the branches shot fireworks!” ~6-30-11 (somewhere in there, i think he means “heather”)

“the top of you smells so good i could eat you up!” ~7-3-11

quinn:  what if i died when i was five? would you cry forever and not stop?

me: yes, i would.

quinn: i would cry forever and not stop because i didn’t make it to twenty.

me: i want to make it to one hundred.

quinn: i want to make it to a hundred, too! i want to make it to a thousand! a thousand, mama, please, and then one more after a thousand!

quinn: one time, before i was quinn, i was a pirate captain and i had a ship. i didn’t have a home on land at all, my home was on my ship.

me: how did you like that, having your home be on a ship only? did you wish you had a home on land, or did you like just having a ship for a home?

quinn: i liked it. my only home was on a ship and i liked it.

lots of stories these days begin with “one time, before i was quinn…” or “once i had a brother…”

last night, with sniffly nose:

me: are you feeling sick?

quinn: yes, it’s just that i’m coughing all the time, and my mouth is open and the far distance of my mouth is all salty!

later…

quinn: my sickness seems to be pushing your milk back into you so i can have some to drink! (happy breastfeeding week, y’all!)

simple poems

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“the rain comes out of the moon’s tummy.” 1-8-11

“i’m the tooth giver” (tooth fairy) 1-28-11

“we should make our own muffin cases soon. (they are just paper)” 1-28-11

his people, in their garden, had an empty muffin wrapper (post-muffin) that he wouldn’t let me compost yet because it was their round garden bed and they were “waiting for muffin season.” 1-28-11

“i decided you could be my milk spinner” 1-30-11

“my dream will be about big sunflowers, trees, rocks, holes in the snow, tracks in the snow.” 1-29-11

“i’m going to dream about sunflowers, trees and snow.” later, adding to his list: “totem poles, bus schedules, maps, buoys, rope, crab traps, fish traps, net…..”

simple poems ~ story ice cream in a bowl

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i knew that as soon as i posted about quinn’s little one-line poems, i would find a dozen more in some pile of pocket lint lodged for “safekeeping” in a very safe, undisclosed location in my house…. undisclosed to me, that is.

11-18-10

“the trees are making it wind

and the wind is waving goodbye…”

later the same blustery day, to the sound of rain on the roof:

“like marbles rolling down a hill…”

and after i asked if he had seen a crow i was looking at:

“i didn’t see the crow and neither did he see me!”

and some new ones:

12-23-10

“i wish i could fly like a bird. like a seagull. i would eat fish. see, i’m catching a fish and i’m going to pinch a piece of meat and eat it.” (ok maybe not so poetic for those of you who don’t eat meat but….)

“i’m gonna pretend i’m a duck

then an eagle

then a raven

then a sun and a moon and an earth

then a SEAGULL!!!”

12-24-10

story of eagle boy and the baby bear; i promise, he really really did make up this story! i transcribed it from the audio recorder on my phone:

“one day there was a boy who flapped his hands with his arms out wide as he was pretending he was an eagle, and FLEW off! one day when the eagle boy was playing in the forest he heared a voice saying HELP HELP HELP! and flew out of the forest- he stopped playing and flew out of the forest and ALL the way and landed on a beach and walked to the edge and saw a little bear on an isl- washing up on an island. and then he saw that the baby bear was safe and washed up on the island. he had to find the mama and dada for th bear. i was walking and i saw him in the water as he floated to the island. ‘that won’t do,’ said the boy. alright. and if that happened, i would have to build a boat for y- a canoe for you. and you can sail. so the eagle boy made uh a kind of sort of canoe raft and threw it right in  SPLASH in the water. the baby bear pulled the island aboard… the baby bear jumped off the island onto the raft canoe and pulled the island on board. and the um eagle boy THREW a paddle down. the baby bear caught it, and paddled his way back to his mama and dada bear. and the eagle boy flew back to his mama and dada gir-l- his mama was a girl, his dada was a boy. ’cause it was time for lunch- ’cause it was time for eating- ’cause it was lunchtime. how’s THAT story?”

me: that’s WONDERFUL!!!

“yeah! for dessert. THAT story was good for eating for dessert. yeah. i could put lots of the story ice cream in a bowl, and put lots of dessert in there.”

(eagle boy picture blast from the past… 23 months old at yaquina head)

1-5-11

looking into the woodstove:

“the orange is like the sea. there is dark orange below and light orange on top. the log is the boat, floating on the sea. the sparkles are the cleats on the boat. the steam is the lines on the boat.”

have i mentioned we are boat-obsessed? 😉

simple poems

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many of the things my little boy says are poetry to my ears:

12-4-10 on our way somewhere… (i manage to gather a fraction of these bits of poems on scraps of paper and a few of them survive the trip through the laundry in the pocket of my jeans and make it all the way here- so the context is often completely obliterated from my mind by the time i am typing them up.)

“…breathing the breeze and smelling the sun….”

last night 12-22-10 after saying goodnight to the moon, in its hazy glowing not-quite-clouded-over-yet beauty, on our way back from picking him up at dada’s:

“the moon is pulling its cloud blankets up over itself.”

i love the possibilities that are open in his mind- so little is off limits. he has been doing a lot of drawing lately, and having me collaborate quite a bit in the process to “help” him with the hard parts. i just love seeing how his brain puts things together, how mama and dada’s legs are so infinitely long, sprouting directly from our heads, and how mouths only sometimes matter but eyes- they always matter.

he finds it important to connect things- like when he draws the eyes on his people, he “attaches” them with string to the skull. or if the lines we use to draw the boat don’t meet up perfectly, he lashes them together with some rope and then advises both dada (who’s not in the room) and me to “keep your sure on you to never ever untie that line, ever!” we don’t want the boat sinking, now do we? he also likes to draw arrows so things know which way they are going.

“and here is an arrow pointing which way the little green boat is going. it’s going to the orange house with just mama because quinn is at the shop with dada.”

“did mama take quinn to the shop in the boat?” i asked.

“yeah. that’s the way some people do it. you poke a lot of holes in the road, and it makes water. then you don’t drive your cars, you drive your boats and canoes.”

it is so pretty in his head. 🙂