Silly Me

Poetry Friday is arrayed beautifully today by Tabatha Yeatts.

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In anguished times we nest in joy –

welcoming babies, nurturing the toddling ones,

helping kiddos in our own vibrant circles & seeing that other

young ones who cross our paths feel secure.

Despite. Still. In the face of.

 

With this week’s events in Paris, I renew my pledge to freedom of speech, bread & butter theme in my years as a community journalist. While at the same time I will visit a favorite school & my story time circle this Friday for laughs with Kindergarten and First Grader sprites who should be allowed to be spritely. The best way I can do this is with my traveling hand puppet, Book Bear & with books that make children laugh out loud.

With awful timing, a long-planned piece about silly book titles ran on Jan. 7, 2015. It begins:

 

 

Silly Me

by Jan Godown Annino

There was a young woman said, ‘Howww..,”

my mother would sing in the kitchen.

My aunt would chime in with,

“can I flee from this horrible cowww?”

And my other aunt would trill,

“Shall I sit on a stile and continue to smile…”

so that my mother would finish,

“which would frighten the heart of the cowww?”

thereby completing their own particular cracked

take on Edward Lear’s rhyme.

Aunts Singing Chants

This trio left me in stitches, ladies in flowery ruffled kitchen aprons, cutting up meat and veggies, cutting up in words and songs. (Not that the gals couldn’t argue stridently but that’s a different genre of story…)

The ladies performed Lear, Lewis Carroll, Gelette Burgess & the words of others with a knack for nonsense. Their impromptu silly making at holidays, directly lopes to my seeking out fun poems and hilarious picture books to read with BookPALS.

~~~

Now, the rest of the story

The article just quoted was published just before the magazine staffers and police guarding Charlie Weekly (named for the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, from the reports I’ve read) in Paris lost their lives this week in a terrorist attack.

I invite you to read “Silly Me” at Group Blog, a cooperative of readers and writers of children’s stories, organized last year by an innovative public school librarian, Todd Burleson.

I wish my readers happiness in each day.