Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school POEM I WROTE FOR MY DAUGHTER TODAY

and thought some of this might be familiar to this group...

THREE YEARS OLD



You trace the Yangtze river, then spin

the globe, the texture of topography

intoxicating under tiny fingers.

In silly seriousness, you sing

yourself electric when you find Antartica,

visions of Emperor penguins pull

on you like a magnet; you dream of icicles,

shiver with the thrill of snowfall. The world

isn�t big enough for your wonder. Dinosaurs

stomp across your dreams and their polysyllabic names

are scattered in the scat poetry of pretend play.

In your room hang planets of bright plastic dangling

around a crinkled paper sun. Their names roll off your tongue

in your sing song enthusiasm: Mercury Venus Earth

Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune you pause

�Pluto is considered a dwarf planet, right?� You know

which is hottest, closest to the sun, biggest,

and you tell me you will ride in a rocket ship

some day. I am stationary and you are moving away

in concentric circles from atoms to my arms to your telescope.

There are so many stars, so many possibilities

so will you lay with me here in the late day sun

of a mundane Sunday when I was imperfect

while I will count the seconds of stillness

before you leap away to look out a window

�those are cirrus� I answer before you ask.

Later we shred cotton balls to be clouds

in a sky of watercolor blue and our world is small

and you crawl into my lap and forget

triceratops, cumulonimbus, comets

and for a moment I was the sun

you spun around: silent