On, In, and Around Mondays: Come Away

It is rainy this morning, and a big blue book of poems sits on the table. My girls and I have been reading together, just like we did last year, a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

I'm not sure how it came together, but somehow we've landed on Yeats and all things Irish.

I have read Yeats before, was required to in college, but I didn't read him like this. The section begins with a poem called "The Stolen Child" and I can hardly get the words out to my children...

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

My girls and I talk about this (me holding back tears). We talk about how there is a little bit of faery in every parent who wishes to shelter a child, to keep the child a forever-child. We talk about the end of the poem, where the stolen child goes away with the faeries, only to miss...

the calves on the warm hillside
or the kettle on the hob

It is a conversation for both of us— me and my girls: They, sometimes afraid to grow, preferring to be stolen away to the place where...

to and fro we leap
and chase the frothy bubbles
while the world is full of troubles

Me, wanting my girls to live in the place full of berries/And of reddest stolen cherries.

I touch the blue book of poems this morning, think of how my Eldest went off after the reading, to begin her own story of an Aisling who loses her blue ball in a stream pool and asks three children to help her retrieve it. They do, and in thanks she says, "I will give you a song."

She sat cross-legged on the ground with the ball on her lap and started to sing. She did not use words but an eerie wordless melody that seemed to fill the air and the stream...It was unbearably beautiful.

And I am still holding back tears.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...