Theme in Yellow by Carl Sandburg

I SPOT the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o’-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

—

 by Carl Sandburg

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Just Out of the Sea by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1915)

Joaquin Sorolla (Valencian Spanish, Impressionism, 1863-1923): Just Out of the Sea, 1915. Oil on canvas, 130 x 155 cm. Museo Sorolla, Madrid, Spain.
Of Interest: http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssen/ficha_artista/536
Of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaqu%C3%ADn_Sorolla

Boy and Egg

Every few minutes, he wants

to march the trail of flattened rye grass

back to the house of muttering

hens. He too could make

a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh

it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it

to his ear while the other children

laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,

so little yet, too forgetful in games,

ready to cry if the ball brushed him,

riveted to the secret of birds

caught up inside his fist,

not ready to give it over

to the refrigerator

or the rest of the day.

–

by Naomi Shihab Nye

I Want —

I want children to play upon my grave.

Fragile kites let out on lines held in sticky hands,

Pockets weighty with throwing pebbles;

Ant-army marches across greenest grasses,

Knees drawn high and feet bare

to the first timid days of summer.

Childish voices, noisy and forgetful

of the solemn nature of

life, six feet below the living.

On Cassatt’s Breakfast in Bed

What are you thinking of, Mother Dear,

as you clasp your cherubic child before

you and gaze off into the distance

between courses of honeyed tea and buttery toast?

The movements of the moon?

Mathematical proofs?

Mycology and mineralogy?

Or the sweet deliciousness of another few minutes of sleep,

so you can dream you live in a world where

mothers are the engineers of their own mornings?

Mary Cassatt – Breakfast in Bed