Poems with Annelise

My daughter Annelise is eight. She has a wonderful ear for poetry and a great sense of story. Here are three poems she and I worked on together.

Bunny in the Yard

Through the yard
Behind our house,
Into the garden
Quiet as a mouse

Creeps a bunny
Soft, brown, and furry.
Without his own money
He steals in a hurry.

The carrots I throw
Later it eats,
And in our garden
It has a feast.

When I move, it jumps
Fast as a cheetah, whence
It hurries and scurries
Out the hole in our fence.

I watch for the bunny
Every day,
Hoping he’ll come back
To our yard to play.

Baby Bluebirds

When I walk too close
To the bluebird house,
The mother bird squawks,
“Go somewhere else.”

Then in a flash
She flies over my head,
Taking worms to her babies
In their bluebird bed.

They chatter and fight
And argue in their nest
About who gets the worm
And who is the best.

To be nice, those birds
Will never learn.
Then Mommy calls
And I return

To our house, where my
Brothers and I argue and squawk
About who will stay home
When we go for a walk.

Picking Apples and Peaches

One Saturday morning
We went for a ride
To pick apples and peaches
On a mountainside.

Through tall weeds
And swarms of bees
We walked to ladders
Leaning on trees.

The apples were ripe
And soon filled our bucket;
Each peach was so golden
I wanted to pluck it.

When we had enough fruit
We got in our van
And stopped at the barn
To pay the nice man.

That night back at home,
Some sweet apple pie
And yummy peach cobbler
For the pickers to try.

Annelise Marsh
and Devon Marsh
August 23, 2009