Today's Poem - Wednesday

Today I read to the girls from Sylvia Plath's Ariel. You might say, isn't that a little heavy for an almost two-year-old and almost four-year-old, even for little New Yorkers? And generally, yes I think it is. But Molly loves her stuffed animal horse, named Ariel, so it seemed an obvious choice. Even more so when I looked-up a little background about the poem, and it turns out Plath herself had a real-live horse also named Ariel. Talk about coincidences!

The anthology's cover is a nice glossy white with A R I E L written in a clear black block print, so Molly enjoyed this poem from the very first moment the book was presented. For those of you interested in a developing a poetry curiculum for your preschoolers as well, here's Ariel:

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks --

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls methrough air --
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels

WhiteGodiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.