My Childhood Poetry

Yes, I purposely misspelled “lane” to be clever, because this article is about me—not the current me, but the little me. I put one of my poems in my “Cats I Have Loved” Hub (it’s the longest poem I’ve ever written), and where appropriate, I will put other poems in Hubs. I have published many poems, a number of them in the “Shoreline” column of The News Guard, Lincoln City, Oregon, many years ago, and now many in the newsletter I edit, “Sweet Comfort,” as welll as other publications. Some of the poems in the newsletter were actually written when I was only ten. They come from a book I wrote and illustrated in 5^th grade.

At home I have oodles of files in several file cabinets, and I’m not always sure what’s in them. Some have things that need to be thrown out, but I have to sort them to separate them from things I want to keep. One day not long ago, in one of those manila folders I came across a treasure:

The image is cropped improperly because the scanner chopped off the S at the end of the title and my name at the bottom, but you get the idea. It wasn’t the first book I made. In 2^nd grade, I made a picture book, a simple story about Halloween, by staying in recesses to put it together in crayon. I don’t know what happened to that book, but I remember the story. Two children went trick-or-treating and saw scary sights. Then they came home to a surprise party. On one page, I forgot to draw the girl’s hair so she was bald.

I was an unpopular little thing, so I determined to grow up to be a famous artist and writer so that people would read about me in the newspaper and be sorry they picked on me. The cover of My Poems bears testimony to my putting art before writing in those early years. I drew the cover first and was more ambitious in my plans of content than the actual book would cover. Within its pages are no kiwis, no monkeys, no turkeys, no Abraham Lincoln, no Valentine’s Day poems. There are eleven poems, under the categories Holidays, Nature, True, and an unnamed section in which the final poem, Good-bye appears.

I later tried my hand at children’s picture books to send to Gotelot (I don’t know how to check the spelling of this), which published books by children for children, but was told by my instructor, “Neatness counts.” The illustrations were well-drawn for someone my age, but the coloring was apparently not up to standard, so they were not submitted to the publisher. As for the stories, the ones that made it to finished form were not entirely original. The Zonks was similar to Dr. Suess’s The Sneeches, although the solution to the problem was different. I got the idea for Arthur was an Aardvark from a song by Allan Sherman. You may be saying I also borrowed the aardvark’s name, but this was decades before those books and that TV series came into being. I don’t know what has become of my old children’s books, which I so lovingly bound with thick cardboard with decorative cloth glued onto it.

As the years passed, my love of art more and more took a back seat to my love of writing, although through high school I took art classes every semester and tried to be a graphic artist by trade. It might have bode better for me had I gone to art school, but that “neatness counts” advice still haunts me. I’m not good at hand lettering. I still dabble in art, but mostly to illustrate my writing. Some of my art can be seen in some of my Hubs, including “Vampires: Legend vs. Fiction,” “The Lighter Side of Vampires” (I’m quite proud of those color illustrations), and the cartoons in “Apostrophes for Dummies” (the latter is illustrated with cartoons, which don’t show up very clearly because the lines are thin. Unlike my cartoonist daughter, I take a long time to do one picture, so that slows me down on some of the Hubs I want to do. Since I must not use anything copyrighted by someone else, so I use my own drawings, paintings, or photographs. Last September I worked on pictures for two Hubs at a campout.

Recently I was able to plug my scanner to my own computer that is in my room, instead of having to use my daughter’s, which is attached to her computer in the living room. So I have more freedom to scan my artwork. I bought a digital camera before Christmas, and you may have seen some of its pictures already. These two pieces of technology will help assure me more creativity speed with my Hubs and my newsletter. I bought two clip art CDs, which I can use on the newsletter, but the user agreement says not to use them on the Internet. That seems odd to me, but if I understand the agreement right, I will not be able to put the clipart on my Hubs.

Okay, you want to read some of the poems? I wrote the original version of this article for my newsletter, and those readers have already been inflicted—ehem, gifted?—with some of those childhood poems. They are not as good as my later poetry, except perhaps where I basically plagiarized family members, but here goes.

M is for Mitsie

M is for Mitsie,

She is my dog, 

I really love her,

Even in fog.

G is for Goldust

G is for Goldust,

She is my cat,

She’s very old,

So what do you think of that?

Wait, before you run away. There are better ones.

As I was in the back yard

I saw a strange black cat.

My dog started barking,

But the cat still sat,

But finally she started to run,

Up the fence he went,

But when I fed my cat

She picked up the scent,

She chased away my cat

And ate her food.

She soon did this every night

Until we got in a bad mood.

We threw rocks at her,

We chased her,

We let the dog chase her,

And finally we realized

This cat had no home

So to our house she would roam,

So when we feed our cats

We put out two dishes
and fill them both.

As you can see, my passion for pets was spilling out into my writing even then. If you want to read more about my pets, see Gabriel: Remembering an Exceptional Cockatiel and Cats I Have Loved.

Okay, just one more for now (more in a later Hub, if there appears to be an interest).

As I walk into this dark, deserted house

I hear the door and shutters

Banging in the wind,

Or is it the wind? Could it be ghosts?

A dead body lies at the bottom of the steps

As I walk into the dark basement;

A skeleton lies on the back porch,

eyeless sockets gleaming at me;

A howling sound comes from outside,

On this dark and windy night.

Alone!

In the dark!

In the night!

No one will hear me if I scream!

The closest village is ten miles away!

There’s a banging like footsteps out in the dark

And on the door!

The walls and ceiling are starting to close in on me!

I start to run out of the house,

When a mouse runs in front of me.

The banging grows louder!

And so do the shutters!

I stand frozen still, just ready to scream!

When the clouds blow away from the moon.

The room is filled with light.

I look around

And I see that the banging on the door was only a tree,

And that from out further 

Was only lemons falling on the ground from the deserted
lemon trees,

And that on the shutters only the wind

And the howling only dogs.

There’s nothing mysterious about this house,

A sad house,

Crying for its lots family,

Its lost love.

The skeleton, which was that of a cat

Must have been the family’s cat.

The body was a toy soldier

Of the little boy who once lived there.

The people left the house

And even the family cat.

The cat stayed there and died there.

Now, the house is dying, and crying,

Crying for its lost love.

I fudged a bit when I put “The Deserted House” in the “True” section. Actually, I must have decided on the category before I completed the poem. There is an interesting story behind this one.

What really happened was this: On some sort of trip with my family, we came upon a deserted house and investigated. We joked that it was haunted. There really was a toy soldier at the foot of the stairs, and my brother said it was a “dead body.” There really was a skeleton of a cat, but the reality was scarier than the poem: It was in a small tree or large bush.

I was going to describe everything as we saw it, embellished by the pretence of hauntedness. Whether I was going to reveal the true nature of things, I don’t remember. But it was my father, who advised me in a lot of my writing, who both introduced me to blank verse for the purpose of this poem and who suggested the house was pining for its lost family. On that note, he suggested I put the cat on the porch to give the impression it had died alone, faithful to the home whose family had deserted it.

Other family members helped with other poems. My eldest brother Dave dictated possibly all of “The Pumpkin” to me. And my second eldest brother Mike gave me the quote a friend of his: “First there was beauty, then there was man,” which I quoted almost exactly in my poem, “Then Came Man.”

Now that I have perked your interest (at least, I hope), I will leave you wondering about the poems I didn’t post and maybe pick up the rest of the theme later.