Poem 56 (Pandemic Day 60)

Two People

She reads the paper,

while he turns on TV

she likes the mountains,

he craves the sea.

He'd rather drive,

she'll take the plane;

he waits for sunshine,

she walks in the rain.

He gulps down cold drinks,

she sips at hot;

he ask, "Why go?"

she asks, "Why not?"

In just about everything

they disagree,

but they love one another

and they both love me.

Illustration by John Nez

Eve Merriam, A Word or Two With You: New Rhymes for Young Readers,  Atheneum, 1981.

How comforting to imagine that people with differing habits, interests and propensities can still love one another and create a happy family.  How remarkable it would be if we could expand that beyond the couch and the home and into the world.

 I turned to works by Eve Merriam often as a teacher.  You could truly experience the joy that she felt in poetry as she played with words.  When I directed a choral reading choir of 2nd and 3rd graders, her poems were often chosen, because as... Merriam urged: "Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it."

"As one who practiced what she preached, Merriam's poetry was particularly conducive to being read out loud. Her poems exemplify her fascination with language, as evidenced by her puns and word puzzles, her concentration on the eccentricities and idiosyncracies of the English language, and her broad use of poetic devices, such as onomatopoeia, inner rhyme, alliteration, assonance, metaphor, and so forth, in addition to traditional rhyming. "How to Eat a Poem," originally from Merriam's second children's poetry collection, It Doesn't Always Have to Rhyme, illustrates Merriam's use of metaphor, but it is also "a poem of the invitational mode," noted Zaidman. Accordingly, "How to Eat a Poem" includes the lines: "Don't be polite./ Bite in./ Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin./ It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are." Overall, Zaidman held that It Doesn't Always Have to Rhyme could serve "as an excellent minicourse in the elements of poetry" because it contains the distinctive poems "Metaphor," "Simile: Willow and Ginkgo," "Couplet Countdown," "Quatrain," "Learning on a Limerick," "Beware of Doggerel," "Onomatopoeia," and "A Cliche." Merriam also worked with the positioning of the words on the page, thus bringing the visual sense into her verse more fully." (from the Poetry Foundation; link attached to Eve Merriam's name above)