Tag: NikkI Grimes

A WALK IN THE WOODS–A Picture Book and a Poem

WELCOME TO POETRY FRIDAY! Today I have the honor of hosting on this mid-August day.

What is Poetry Friday? Find out HERE, on Poet Renee LaTulippe’s website. In short, it’s a bevy of children’s book lovers, poets, teachers, librarians, and artists who share their blogs every week. What’s on my mind today? This book:

As I was roaming the children’s poetry shelf at my local bookstore this week, I discovered Nikki Grimes’ 2023 picture book A WALK IN THE WOODS, Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney and his son, Brian Pinkney. The back story, how this book came to be, is told eloquently in the back matter..

Briefly, Nikki Grimes, and a longtime friend of artist Jerry Pinkney, began a picture book together several years ago. The work to illustrate Grimes’ story was sadly interrupted by Jerry Pinkney’s death.

Fortunately, the artwork was continued by his son Brian Pinkney and also his niece Charnel Pinkney Barlow. It’s a story about a young man’s experience of loss after his Dad. What is it like for him to lose his father and what will be his path forward?

The poems and art are uplifting, hopeful, never too sentimental. Given the losses so many young people have experienced during the pandemic and through gun violence it’s fair to say that many are still grieving along with their families and will for a long time.

A WALK IN THE WOODS begins with this picture and text:

There is never an answer to such a question, but this young man’s father does answer him. He has left him a map of their beloved woods nearby, a place they both loved, with a red X marking a treasure waiting for him. Dad also leaves a key to the treasure.

So the young man is sent on a journey and he heads to the wood. What is this treasure? The reader wonders as we begin our walk in the woods.

Just being in nature is itself a comfort. Grimes writes:

The soft song of a Carolina Wren
settles me as I sidestep fallen limbs, 
keep and eye peeled for rabbits,
and survey a stairway of mushrooms
sprouting from the trunk of a tree, 
and with each step,
the hurt inside my heart pounds less and less.

Yes, nature has that affect on people. On the way into the woods, the boy encounters woodland creatures, beautifully illustrated: a rabbit, an eagle, a brood of grouse in a nest. Eventually he arrives at his destination: a treasure box. He opens it.

Inside the box are treasures Dad left behind for him are his sketches and poems from when he was a young man, here’s one:

Garter Snake

Quick!
Someone's coming to gather
the sun-beaten diamonds
along your coiled,
cold-blooded body. 
I wonder how much those diamonds are worth?
HURRY!
Slither behind those rocks
leading into the woods.
I'll see you again, tomorrow.

Here’s another gorgeous page:

North East Red Fox

An earth of foxes is given chase.
Young Red Fox races the wind.
His cousins fall far behind.
What becomes of them?
Once safe, he pauses
and dares look back.
Too late?

On one page a Great Horned Owl looks out at us and on another, a deer, with Dad’s accompanying poems.

In the end, Dad has left an encouraging note and permission for the boy to write his own story, live his own life, which we all must do, after a loss:

I leave you these drawings,
these scribbles, and mostly, this forest--
the true treasure.
Finish my stories or not,
but this last page is for you, Son. 
Draw and write your own story. 
I'll always be watching.

This is a beautiful book and it made me think of losses in my life. After reading this picture book, I wrote a simple and short poem about my mother who has been gone for more than a few years, though she lived a long life. Though I was older than the main character in Grimes’ story, like the boy in the book, I see Mom’s eyes in my own eyes when I look in the mirror.

I have always found it hard to write about loss of a loved one. When writing about such things, it helps to have some distance.

To My Mom

I know you are gone
no need to be told
but you often feel near
to imagine, to hold.

When I look in the mirror
I look in your eyes
I'm used to it now
you're my Mom, no surprise.

My voice is like yours
so I have been told
so much of me
seems directly bestowed. 

Still I am myself,
as I miss you so much,
and will never forget
your care and your touch. 

© Janice Scully 2024

Have a great weekend. I look forward to reading your posts!

ORDINARY HAZARDS, BY NIKKI GRIMES (and another haiku of a president)

I can’t believe another Friday is here! Thank you, Jone Rush MacCulloh, for hosting Poetry Friday at Deo Writer. A journal give away, don’t miss it!

Last week I posted two novels in verse and one memoir in verse. This week I read another wonderful memoir in verse.

At a Highlights retreat I attended over a year ago, Nikki Grimes, the award winning author of numerous books for young people, talked with attendees about her work in progress, a memoir in verse, about her troubled but fascinating childhood. She spoke with much insight about the challenge of retrieving memories. And in ORDINARY HAZARDS, she writes:

                      THE MYSTERY OF MEMORY #4
                       
                       Where do memories hide?
                          They sneak into
                        Hard-to-reach crevices,
                       and nestle quietly until
                          some random thought
                         or question burrows in,
                          hooks one by the tail
                               and pulls
                       Finally, out into the light
                                it comes,
                               sheepishly.

Nikki Grimes writes so honestly in poems about the struggles she faced beginning in the 1950’s as a very small girl. This includes her mother’s mental illness, a frightening foster care system, poverty, assaults and bullying by local gang members, and sexual abuse by her step-father, to name some of the “hazards” she encountered. And overlying all of this is one of the largest, the ever present racism that she, as black person, faced every day. The setting is New York City.

Nikki moves from home to home, school to school, often feeling like an outsider. She writes in her notebook concerning one of her foster homes:

Notebook

"Don't get comfortable,"
my foster sister Grace tells me.
"You don't belong here."
Thanks a lot! Like I don't know
I don't belong anywhere . . .

She describes her relationship with her mother who was schizophrenic, alcoholic, and unreliable. But it’s clear how important her mother is in these evocative lines.

SIZE DOESN'T MATTER

Four-foot-nine.
Such a tiny person
to have her initials
carved so deeply into
the meat of my soul.

There is a lot of heartbreak in these pages, but this memoir is also full of joy.

She writes about her many blessings, such as her sister’s affection, her faith in God, the comfort she discovers in books, her gift for writing, teachers who encourage, school friends, a father who was there to support her as an artist, amazing mentors, such as James Baldwin, who when she was a teen, asked to see her work, and always, her indomitable spirit. She more than survives.

She meets others who provide a larger, world view. In her notebook is this excerpt:

Notebook

"This too shall pass,"
my teacher tells me.
I'd suck my teeth and turn away,
but I don't because 
Mrs. Wexler told me
she's a Holocaust survivor,
and I read
The Diary of Anne Frank

It’s impossible to do justice to ORDINARY HAZARDS with these few lines. It must be read and it’s well worth the time.

Now, as for a poem of mine to share here at Poetry Friday, I’ll share a fifth “Guess who haiku,” about yet another president.

Does anyone recognize this guy? Read on.

 Soon after the war
 declared Reconstruction done—
 fear ruled the bayous.


 

 #19 RUTHERFORD B. HAYES (1877-1881) This president removed all the troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. He believed in racial equality but wrongly believed Southern whites would treat blacks fairly. A hundred years of lynching and other violence against blacks followed.