The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems By a Little Girl, by Hilda Conkling

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Poems By a Little Girl

Author: Hilda Conkling

Contributor: Amy Lowell

Posting Date: October 29, 2008 [EBook #1612]
Release Date: January, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS BY A LITTLE GIRL ***

Produced by Charles Keller

POEMS BY A LITTLE GIRL

By Hilda Conkling

With A Preface By Amy Lowell

FOR YOU, MOTHER

I have a dream for you, Mother,
Like a soft thick fringe to hide your eyes.
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. For I wish at
the outset to state, and emphatically, that it is poetry, the stuff and
es