TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword by J Patrick Lewis ANIMALS Elephant Bill Jackrabbit Jack 1987 Fireflies 1986 How the Yellow Jacket Lost Her Shyness 1992 Midnight Blue or The Cockroach’s Song 1992 Mosquito 1985 One Cow Two Moos 1985 Ocean Diners 1982 Snake Song 1986 A Tomcat Is 1986 PEOPLE Baby Contralto 1994 The Trumpeter 1996 The First American Woman in Space 1990 The First Human To Go Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel and Survive 1993 The First Man to Run a Four-Minute Mile 1988 The Biggest Bubble-Gum Bubble Ever Blown 1997 First Men on the Moon 1986 The Greatest 1991 I Decided to Stay Up in the Air Forever 1993 The Many and the Few 1993 READING A Book Is 2001 A Classic 2001 The Gentleman Bookworm 1995 Please Bury Me in the Library 2001 Great Good Bad 1995 Read Think Dream 1991 SPORTS Baseball Poem 2004 How the Book of Baseball Was Written 2005 The Kentucky Derby 1994 The Longest Home Run 2005 My Baseball Glove 2004 6 8 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 28 29 31 32 33 34 36 38 39 40 41 42 43 44
TABLE OF CONTENTS RIDDLES AND EPITAPHS Riddles 1993 2006 Tombstone Poems 2002 2005 A Dairy Farmer 2003 A Baseball Pitcher 2005 A Gardener 2002 A Schoolteacher 2002 MOTHER NATURE The First Recorded 6,000-Year-Old Tree in America 1999 The Gray of Day 2004 Her-i-Cane 1995 Nature’s Art Gallery 2010 Orange Johnson 1994 What a Day 2010 Weather by the Old Masters 2010 PLACES What to Wear Where 1995 Home Sweet Home 1995 Okefenokee Swamp Song 1992 Slowly around the U S A 1992 New Names Old Places 1998 46 52 52 53 53 53 54 57 59 60 63 65 66 68 69 70 72 73 A MIX Are Bluebirds Why Houses 74 Have Windows 2003 76 In the Middle of Your Face 1995 77 Jump-Rope Rhyme 1997 78 Postcard Poem 1996 79 Say Hay Won’t You Be Mine 1995 80 The Queen Takes Drawing Lessons 1995 82 The Tablespoon Gallops Away 1993 Under the Kissletoe 2003 83 The Very Very Finicky Queen of Trouble 1996 84 Why Santa Sometimes Prefers the Front Door 2003 86 Everything Is a Poem 2010 87
FOREWORD What’s the difference between a poem and a poem for children That question has been de bated for several centuries The great poet Robert Frost once said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom Another wordsmith John Barr a good friend who is also the former director of the Poetry Foundation wrote that a children’s poem begins in delight and ends in more delight Of the definitions of poetry there is no end Elsewhere I have called poetry frosted fire the tunnel at the end of the light the nurse at the birth of the alphabet a ladder to the castle in the air a blind date with enchantment and the sound of silence amplified Whatever it is poetry’s key un locks that strangest of all worlds your imagination I was an unlucky fellow in that I did not discover poetry until I was just barely on the sunny side of forty Then having taught college economics for thirty years I realized that I was in the wrong field with the wrong grasshoppers You see in my el ementary school years no teacher or librarian or Pied Piper Author’s Day writer pointed me in the direction of word magic So I became ah-hem an opsimath That is one who learned late in life Once Sister Poetry grabbed me by the hand it didn’t take long to become a fool for verse I hardly knew what to do with myself I started out by sit ting at the feet of two poets in particular Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll were the best children’s poets of the nineteenth century Their work has en dured for good reason and their books became my constant companions After nearly four years of reading classic po
Foreword ems and children’s poems rhymed and free verse the great poets and the not-so-great even the truly awful I thought I had learned the craft well enough to strike out on my own So I said goodbye to my college students and began cobbling words together at the poet’s trade in hopes of making a living As often happens one week followed another and before I knew it seven years had passed The one word I heard that whole time was NO Rejec tions flew into my mailbox like mad Frisbees And there were days I admit when I thought seriously about giving up and becoming a pianist a glass blower or somebody’s Dutch uncle But I kept tell ing myself what I have told children at the nearly five hundred author visits I have made around the world Nothing succeeds like failure Embrace fail ure make it your friend I fail a dozen times every day and that’s just before lunch One day about thirty years ago the swallows dared and I received an acceptance A publisher in New York had said YES to my first manuscript I thought I felt a butterfly doing the salsa on my heart Although I have never taken a creative writing class many writers have told me the first lesson they learned Find your own voice I suppose that’s good advice but not for me I wanted to write poems in a hundred voices That’s why I decided to explore everything under and over the sun in as many different ways as it’s possible to write poetry The kindest thing anyone has ever said about my work is how different it is from one poem to the next If someone tells me I read a poem the other day and I just knew that you had written it I appre ciate the thought but it doesn’t reach my ears as a compliment Why not Because the poem is always more important than the poet This is why you’ll find many voices in my po ems on subjects like extraordinary women famous monuments African Americans extinct animals weird holidays twins I’m one the Civil War Galileo Michelangelo math and science airplanes underwear salesmen riddles rebuses shape po ems anagrams nonsense poetry and every sort of wordplay Some of my poems are gathered here in yet another exquisite Creative Editions book better educated you’re in for a disappointment I wrote these poems to do nothing more or less than entertain the reader to help unlock imagina tions Have I succeeded I don’t know Turn the page You decide If you picked up Everything Is a Poem to be J Patrick Lewis March 2014
