“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Pablo Picasso

Tuesday's child is full of grace.

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

Rainer Maria Rilke

anne - snowsuit 1982

"As we grow up, we put away our laughter and our silliness and our childish noises, the great sensory hilariousness of our young lives. We pick up a few notions about proper behavior, like what books to read and how to go about getting married and buying a home and being polite and having cocktail parties ... and the next thing you know, the little child - who was also an enormously alive sensory apparatus - is just another boring adult going to work in a seersucker suit with a briefcase."

John Rosenthal