Poem

Okay, so, you know how "your children are not your children; they are the sons and the daughters of life, longing for itself"? Yeah. So, well, here's what happened Sunday afternoon.

Cassie and I went to the playground/park nearby so she could get some fresh air, expel ya-ya's, etc. Unfortunately, due to recent snow meltage followed by a long day of rain, the entire main playground/climbing/slide structure turned out now to be in the middle of a rather substantial pond. Some children in knee-high rubber boots had waded across and were clambering around on the equipment, but I had not anticipated this state of affairs, and neither Cassie nor I was adequately shod to join in.

So we spent a little time at the one slide that occupies a separate, non-diluvian spot in the park, walked around a bit, and ended up sitting at a picnic table, as Cassie contemplated a stick and two rocks she had picked up. She explained to Valentina, her red bear, that sticks came from trees, and that rocks came from the sidewalk or tree bark. [?] Then she cuddled up to me, lay her head on my lap, and rested peacefully a moment. A moment later, she sat up and announced, "I'm gonna make a poem."

"Um, okay," I said.

And then she launched into it. It only took me a moment to realize that I needed to fish paper and a pen out of my jacket pocket, but I already had missed what probably amounted to a full stanza. She was talking fast, and some of what she was saying wasn't intelligible, and I suspect that some of it might not have been words at all, but just syllables to fill out her cadence. So I didn't catch nearly all of it. (And I have to say, parts of it had a more distinct rhythm and scanned better in the original.) Here, however, is what I was able to get down:

Trees blow, trees glow ["grow?" I asked--"no, glow," she said]
Every wish that every wish
And every owl flies at night
In the night sky
And I imagine every shape
That the clouds make
And it goes away to make another shape
And every poem... this poem's long
And [something, something, something] wrong.

And the sun is golden white.

Anything that's gold and blue
Anything that's red and pink
Anything that's blue and green
Into the lightning, blowing leaves.

There is another shape of clouds
And every table, every nook
In the house
And every wish you make into
And there's into tables, into two, into two, into two...
And trees blow, flags wave--
American flags.
Tables cloth, tables cloth, tables cloth...

And every word and nook and neck
Move any branch to the side of the sidewalk
In a grassy, mossy hill.

Valentina, Valentina, Valentina,
Valentina too.
Chimney tops in charge of roofs.

When Cassie was done with her poem, she decided that it was time for me to make one, too. She took the pen and paper, and I did my best to oblige. (I was absurdly self-conscious about making my poem not suck, and I had to pause for quite a while at a couple points. Cassie was very patient as she waited for me to get going again.) She very seriously repeated each line after me, as she was "writing" it, and covered the rest of the paper with strings of loops that in some way must represent my poetic effort.

I think that basically, my question about this episode is "wtf?" I mean, I guess it's not as if we've never read a poem to her, but it's certainly not a daily or even weekly occurrence. Maybe they've been doing poetry in school? But what evidence of school-based poetry-related activity comes generally in the form of cutesy little rhymes about snowmen or apples that get sent home with a day's packet of xeroxed schedules and newsletters. I mean, Dada/Beat blank verse it ain't.

As a child, I was careful about following rules, and being a good girl who did things the right way. I was a cautious and probably somewhat annoying little priss. So I have the hardest time wrapping my mind around just deciding you're going to "make a poem" and then coming spontaneously forth with a fluent stream of words and sounds and images. How do you even do that? My artistic efforts all suffer noticeably from being too cramped, controlled, over-careful, over-determined. Constipated is, in fact, the word that comes to mind.

But Cassie's just not like that. It's the same with drawing. She seems not to feel the slightest pressure to make the kinds of pre-determined images that I think of when I remember drawing as a child--those houses with the square bottoms and triangle tops, the flowers all shaped like cartoon daisies, trees like green and brown lollipops. Cassie goes wild with color and form, mixing media as she goes--sometimes turning out meaningless, dashed-off little scribbles but also occasionally taking the time to produce grand, complex, layered, and genuinely beautiful works (often purely abstract but sometimes incorporating some figurative elements).

It's just weird as hell to me. How does she know she can do that? How does she tap into it? Where does she get permission? And could it be that the silly hippie claptrap about the wisdom and creativity of the natural, unfettered child is... true?

I don't know, man. It just blows my little mind.