Subway nursery rhymes

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I love poetry written for children. The good stuff, I mean. Plot-less picture books with trite rhymes and bad meter give the genre a bad name. Growing up I spent hours memorizing poems by Ogden Nash, James Whitcomb Riley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll... good poetry. And I got thinking recently... since the deaths of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein, who writes good children's poetry these days? Who writes nursery rhymes?

I'm a big believer in nursery rhymes. They give small children an ear for language. But the canon is so old now, and fewer and fewer kids are growing up with Mother Goose. So I thought, why not try to write some 21st-Century nursery rhymes? My results were mixed. But I come back to the idea every so often, and I came back to it again this week while waiting on a subway platform, thinking about the impressions of a country girl in the city. The musings and the result were both coloured by Stevenson's poems:

At home the wind lives up a tree
And twirls it all about to see
The other trees all clap their hands
And ask if they can join the dance.

But here the wind lives underground;
It chases all the trains around.
The trains, I guess, don't want to play -
They screech and scream and run away.


At home the wind lives up a tree by Erin Woods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.