NPM 2019 Day 17: Where Readers Come From

Here's another poem I wrote for the summer poetry swap in 2017. This poem was written for Jone MacCulloch of DeoWriter and Check It Out. Since Jone is a librarian (retired), I knew I wanted to write about readers or books. Using George Ella Lyon's poem Where I'm From as a mentor text, this is what I came up with.

Where Readers Come From
     (with apologies to George Ella Lyon)

Readers come from songs,
   from rhyme and finger play.
They come from recitation and repetition
    (all those Moo, Baa, La La La’s
   and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?)
They come from Sunday comics,
   cereal boxes and read alouds
   that feature character voices,
   sound effects,
   and mood lighting.
They come from independent bookstores and libraries,
  from authors and librarians.

They come from
   Once upon a time,
   happily ever after,
  “It was a dark and stormy night,” and
   “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”
They come from Minli, Harriet, and Ramona,
   from Clementine, Omakayas, and Baby Mouse.
They come from Stanley Yelnats, Auggie Pullman, and Jackson Greene,
   from Jin Wang, Octavian Nothing, and Captain Underpants.
They come from Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwarts,
   from Panem, Redwall, and the Island of Berk.

Readers come from “It’s past your bedtime,”
  with flashlights under the covers
  turning page after page,
  racing to the end.

Readers come from letters strung into words
  and words arranged in a million different ways
  into stories that leave us
  gloomy or cheerful,
  quiet or agitated,
  exasperated or pleased,
  and every human emotion in between.

Under my pillow is a well-worn book
  pages bent
  cover crinkled.
I am from this book --
from all those that came before --
and all those yet to come.

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2017. All rights reserved.


Happy Wednesday all. See you tomorrow for another original poem.