April 30: "Child Astronomy," Simplicity Versus Complexity, "Nursery Rhymes"

Billy Collins is star struck . . . 

Child Astronomy

by:  Billy Collins

After many hours

of peering

into a telescope

Goldilocks

discovers a dipper

that is just right.

Children do view things differently than adults, maybe because they haven't had enough time to become jaded or angry about the world and people in general.  Where I might see a lawn that needs to be raked, a kid might sees piles of colors to jump into.  When a blizzard hits, all I think about is shoveling and blocked roads and plows.  A kid thinks about snow days and wind that sounds like a herd of hungry velociraptors.

It's all about simplicity versus complexity.  The older you get, the more complex day-to-day life becomes.  When I was a kid, I worried about having enough Lucky Charms for breakfast.  Now, I worry the cholesterol in my hard-boiled egg.  You see what I mean.  

Part of the job of a poet, I think, is somehow to maintain a sense of childlike wonder.  To see with eyes of amazement.  That's what transforms a poem from the mundane into the extraordinary.  Everything new and shining.

Sometimes Saint Marty sees angels and comets in the heavens, and sometimes he sees smokestacks and air pollution.

Nursery Rhymes

by:  Martin Achatz

I wonder if Mother Goose

ever got tired of rhyming,

if her rough drafts

were all free verse, like

There was an Old Woman

who lived in a shoe.

She had so many children

because she lived in Texas

with no access to birth control.