My friend Anne shared some children’s poems with me today, so I thought I’d post them for keeps. Imagine! Enjoy!
Pipes and Drums
A little Pixie Piper went
A-piping through the glens;
Some folks who heard him thought his notes
A robin’s or a wren’s.
“How late to hear a robin sing
It must be nearly ten!
(The Pixie Piper chuckled and
Went piping down the glen.)
If it wasn’t quite a robin’s note,
fancy ’twas a wren
(The Pixie Piper chuckled and
Went piping down the glen.)
If we’d been there we might have made
The same mistakes ourselves;
The only folks who knew the truth
Were Goblins, Gnomes, and Elves.
The Pixies sought their pixie pipes
The Goblins fetched their drums
The Gnomes and Elves called everywhere,
“The Pixie Piper comes!”
He led them slowly through the town
And slowly back again
Some folks who heard them thought the drums
Were raindrops on the pane.
And, as the Goblin band drew near,
Cried, “Listen to the hail!”
(The Goblin drummers chuckled and
Went drumming down the dale.)
Be careful, pray, the next wet day,
To make quite sure yourselves,
The patter’s really raindrops not
The drums of drumming Elves.
-Lilian Holmes from the “The Golden Flute An Anthology Of Poetry For Young And Children”
The Second-Hand Shop
Down in the grasses
Where the grasshoppers hop
And the katydids quarrel
And the flutter-moths flop –
Down in the grasses
Where the beetle goes “plop,”
An old withered fairy
Keeps a second-hand shop.
She sells lost thimbles
For fairy milk pails
And burnt-out matches
For fence posts and rails.
She sells stray marbles
To bowl on the green,
And bright scattered beads
For the crown of the queen.
Oh, don’t feel badly
Over things that you lose
Like spin tops or whistles
Or doll’s buckled shoes;
They may be the things that
Fairy folk can use,
For down in the grasses
where the grasshoppers hop
A withered old fairy
Keeps a second-hand shop.
-Rowena Bennett
Photo credit: Fairy Pumpkin House by Tinyfroglet via Flickr