Mist marches across the valley.Down a long slope the mist marches.
And then up a long slope the mist marches.
from Carl Sandburg, Mist Marches Across the Valley
Last week I was in a beautiful old farmhouse on the Choptank River where I focused entirely on writing. The first few days were rainy. The river ran high. I loved the wet mornings, watching the mist rise from the river.
Carl Sandburg talks about how mist moving across the valley carries everything with it, armies, kingdoms, guns. The rhythms of nature, like mist, are timeless, indifferent to our triumphs and failures.
When I taught in elementary school, I always looked forward to the first really misty, foggy morning. It was the perfect time to introduce Carl Sandburg’s little haiku (as he referred to it) to the children:
The fog comes on little cat feet, It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches And then moves on.
I never asked children to memorize a poem. I invited them to join me in saying a line that stood out for them. They knew “Fog”almost immediately after I introduced it. By the end of the year, whether I was with kindergartners or fifth grade, we had a reperitorie of a couple of dozen favorites that we knew by heart and we enjoyed together.
Fall was a great time to invite children into the Walter de la Mare’s Someone, too. It is a perfect poem for this season. There is such a mysterious, haunting quality to it, inviting imagination. “I’m sure, sure, sure,”and “At all, at all, at all.”Were great places to join in at first.
Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Someone came knocking;
I’m sure-sure-sure;
I listened, I opened,
I looked to left and right,
But nought there was a stirring
In the still dark night;
Only the busy beetle
Tap-tapping in the wall,
Only from the forest
The screech-owl’s call,
Only the cricket whistling
While the dewdrops fall,
So I know not who came knocking,
At all, at all, at all.
We used to speculate about who came knocking and whether or not they knocked at a fairy door. Could have been, if you have imagination.
I talk more about how I taught poetry in the classroom and the connection between peotry and children’s spirituality in an essay I wrote for the Teachers College Record a few years ago:
Only Those Who See Take Off Their Shoes: Seeing the Classroom as a Spiritual Space, Teachers College Record Volume 111, Number 12, December 2009, pp. 2713–2731
The writing retreat was productive. Wet October mornings brought back memories of mist, children, poetry and times past.
