Always

Feb 12 2020

The sign says Children at Play.

Earnest parents

warning drivers

on this quiet cul de sac.

As if the drunk and distracted

ever heeded signs.

But aren't children, always?

Isn't this their assignment in life;

to learn through play,

to have the luxury

of being irresponsible?

Historians say we invented childhood.

And later

adolescence, old age.

Ever since the Victorians,

when we started growing-up slower

became longer-lived.

But still, it's children, mostly
who play.

A snow-day, and they're out on the cul de sac

shooting balls at nets

playing tag.

A warning sign, a caution?

Or a statement of fact

which should have been obvious?

Classes cancelled, buses stalled.

And what could be more natural

than children at play

in the school without walls.

A while back I came across a website called Poetry 180 / a Poem a Day for American High Schools. It was sponsored by the Library of Congress, and in it former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins (2001 – 2003) has selected 180 poems: a poem to be read daily “in order to make poetry an active part of the daily experience of American high school students.”

He wants them read; but most definitely not analyzed. As he notes in his introduction: “Hearing a poem every day, especially well-written, contemporary poems that students do not have to analyze, might convince students that poetry can be an understandable, painless, and even eye-opening part of their everyday experience.”

Today, I was searching about for some sort of inspiration, and thought I'd see if anything in the list of titles on this site sparked something. Slow Children at Play caught my eye. I read only the title. Later, after riffing on the subject myself, I went back and actually read it. The original poem's brilliance and whimsy come, of course, from ignoring the implied comma and reading the sign literally. While I took as my inspiration just the ...Children at Play part: which may have been far less imaginative, but at least led me to write something that was all my own.

Anyway, here's the poem.

And following it is a Billy Collins poem I very much admire, and which I include here because it helps explain why he admonishes his followers to simply read the poems, rather than analyze them: how being force-fed and formally schooled in poetry – making it work instead of play – destroys poetry for most people, and just when they're at an age to begin to appreciate it.

Slow Children at Play

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner’s-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths,
ohs, that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children, 
thinking, Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?

—Cecilia Woloch

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a colour slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

—Billy Collins