April Poem

Latest news: Pope just left New York, He is in. Happy to think that we are breathing the same air, watching the same sunrise and the same moonlight in the same time zone (Thank you Gosijo for expressing it so nicely). Heard there will be bae fans gathering at the airport to greet him. I am happy that he has an "extended" family that makes sure he is always greeted by someone when landing at any airport in the world.

Some sisters are having April snow this year in Canada, even in Vancouver as Coco reported. Isn't is rare to see snow in Vancouver? Isn't it super rare to see snow in April in Vancouver? Isn't it because our HRH is stepping on the North American ground? Well while he is walking on the American ground at the east coast, the west coast is echoing with pure white snows. Generally speaking, on the east coast, we are having sunshines, blooming flowers, chirping birds, a beautiful spring to welcome our prince. A poetic April for he is here!

The joys of having children is that one will never stop having fun of learning new things. One of the things I learned recently is that April is American's National Poetry Month. Excuse my ignorance, I just got to know there is a "National Poetry Month" through my 6-grade boy. Looking back a month, now I started to see why he got a language art writing project starting in March creating, designing, assembling a booklet of 8 self-composed poems.

One March day at one of our afternoon piano lessons, while it was the time for the older boy to having lessons, the younger one would do his homework, and that day he was staring at the picturesque scene through the sizable window of our teacher's house situated in a peaceful woods, and murmuring out the words like "nature's flawless beauties...". I was thinking, wow! what poem is he making? This sure sounds like describing our prince ...

Weeks later, when in the early April, his poem booklet was back, with teacher's comment "I love it" and a full mark on the poem of which I heard ... "Nature's flawless beauties..." I was curious to see what he wrote. There I found the page that holds that little poem, with his hand-drawn illustrations.





Naturally I asked him, why was the poem written in a staggered way. Then one more thing I found that I learned was - this poem's style is called "stair peom", in which you are required to write the poems in stair forms, one line beneath the other, each line shifted left to make up a four level stairs. The first line is a summary of the object. The second line is where and/or when about the object, the third line has to consist 3 adjectives describing the object, and the last line will be the name of the object. My son, growing up and fascinated with woods, wrote these little verses:

(I have a hard time to format it correctly as it should be in the stair poem format. This is the best I can do with this blogger. Just imagine that it is in the format as illustrated in the above picture.)

Wondrous Woods

Nature's Flawless Beauties

In parks and forests, year round
Majestic, Lofty, Ancient

Trees

It's a simple poem, but somehow it sticks to my mind. The more I think about it, the more I am feeling it was written to my prince HRH. The more I savor on it, the more I think about HRH and tend to do a little mod to suit my feelings:

Marvelous Man

Nature's Flawless Beauty
In image, in voice, in spirit
Majestic, Lofty, Timeless
BYJ

Thinking one step further, I tend to connect the trees in son's poem with our HRH in the mod version. In my mind, BYJ is just like a unique tree we found in the woods, a tree that we decided to give extra care for, a tree that we watch intently, to anticipate it growing healthily, happily, prosperously. Our love is like the soil, that the tree draws strength, courage, inspiration from.

Thinking one step backwards, I recall an old post I did for the book I read "The Little Prince". In there you'd read the Little Prince has a special rose to take care of. Here I realize that I have a special tree - BYJ.