I have a surprise for you, Mother,
Shaped like a strange butterfly.
I have found a way of thinking
To make you happy;
I have made a song and a poem
All twisted into one.
If I sing, you listen;
If I think, you know.
I have a secret from everybody in the world full of people
But I cannot always remember how it goes;
It is a song
For you, Mother,
With a curl of cloud and a feather of blue
And a mist
Blowing along the sky.
If I sing it some day, under my voice,
Will it make you happy?
Thanks are due to the editors of Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse, The Delineator,
Good Housekeeping, The Lyric, St.
Nicholas, and Contemporary Verse for
their courteous permission to reprint
many of the following poems.
PREFACE
A book which needs to be written is one dealing
with the childhood of authors. It would be
not only interesting, but instructive; not merely
profitable in a general way, but practical in a
particular. We might hope, in reading it, to gain
some sort of knowledge as to what environments
and conditions are most conducive to the growth
of the creative faculty. We might even learn how
not to strangle this rare faculty in its early years.
At this moment I am faced with a difficult task,
for here is an author and her childhood in a most
unusual position; these two conditions--that of
being an author, and that of being a child--appear
simultaneously, instead of in the due order to
which we are accustomed.
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