Hilda Conkling: Child Poet

Thanks to Renee LaTulippe, anyone wanting to know more about the history of children’s poetry can easily find it. On her blog, http://nowaterriver.com, can be found a video library of interviews of contemporary children’s poets as well as interviews with poet, anthologist and historian Lee Bennett Hopkins, who, sadly, recently passed away. He will be missed. Four videos he created with Renee, entitled, A History of American Children’s Poets of the 20th Century, is a wonderful legacy. There, I discovered child poet Hilda Conkling, possibly the first American children’s poet.

Young Hilda never actually wrote a poem herself. Rather, from the ages of 4-10, she recited poems to her mother, who wrote them down. Poems by a Little Girl, is a collection of poems, published in 1920 and easily found in the public domain. There are many poems. One, that gives an image of the reflection of the sky in water caught my attention. I imagine many poets must have written about that because I, too, have. Here’s Hilda’s poem found on http://gutenberg.org:

WATER

The world turns softly

Not to spill its lakes and rivers.

The water is held in its arms

What is water,

That pours silver,

And can hold the sky?

© Hilda Conkling 1920

I love how the lakes and rivers hold water “in its arms.” Now, here is my take on the water “holding” the sky, one hundred years later from an adult point of view.

LAKE-SKY

It stopped by this morning,

for only a minute.

For the lake-sky to be

All it took was to see.

Clouds filled the gray,

In bundles and bundles,

Patches of blue,

The yellow sun, too.

A watery mirror,

A picture of dawn.

When a breeze came along

The lake-sky was gone.

© Janice Scully 2019

Thank you to Hilda Conkling and your mother for giving Children Poems by a Little Girl.