Adele: Mommy, what’s a poem?

Mommy: Palpapble and mute, as a globed fruit.

Adele: I don’t like fruit. Just banana.

Mommy: Just kidding, Petunia. I don’t write poetry, so I don’t have the means to explain it very well. But a poem is an expression that takes the form of writing that most children love. Lots of poems rhyme, and children love that, and lots of poems become songs, and children love that. Poetry is actually everywhere. It’s how we think and feel and are, made into words.

Adele: Like feed me please, feed me peas?

Mommy: Yes, like that. It doesn’t have to rhyme, you know.

Adele.: Nurse me now, Mommy-Cow? 

Mommy: I wrote a poem for your brother once. I thought it was lovely. I don’t think anyone else would think so. That’s what happens when you get older, Petunia. You become more self-conscious. About everything. And I think materialistic cultures like ours take self-consciousness to new levels. When I was a little girl, I wrote a lot of poems. I read them to other people and to my family. Now I would never do that. Part of it is because I think the way we value poetry is incredibly contradictory.

Adele: Want to eat, need your teat.

Mommy: Hardly any poet in the world, for instance, can make a living writing poetry, but we teach it in our schools and encourage children to write it and love it and understand it and explore it. We test them on it. Why do we do that, if so many poets aren’t given a chance to really be poets? What do we think poetry is for? So who knows what children think of writing and poetry, really, the way we present it to them. And yet so many of my university students write poetry, just to write poetry, because they like it. They know intuitively that poetry is meaningful. Songwriters are poets.

Adele: I want to write a song! How about this: Hit my head on the base of the bed. Turned red. Tried to crawl to the wall. Bawled instead.

Mommy: That was beautiful, Honey Bear.

Adele: Pooped in my dipe. Now you wipe.

Mommy: Your brother Ian might be a poet.

Adele: He’s so funny!

Mommy: He’s a brilliant little boy. While you were eating in your high chair the other day, he walked into the kitchen with a piece of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other and announced, “I’m going to write a poem.” “What’s it going to be about,” we asked. “Birds,” he said. “It’s going to be about birds.”

Adele: Want my brother. Not any other.

Mommy: He came back a few minutes later. “I wrote a poem!” he said. “What does your poem say, Ian?” we asked. He looked at the paper, full of pencil scribbles, then looked up at us. “It says, The birds were mean to us.”

Adele: Birds rock. Must eat my sock.

Mommy: Beautiful. Children are beautiful.