The Imagination by Lori Lawing
Up into the cherry tree Who should climb but little me? I held the trunk with both my hands And looked abroad on foreign lands… If I could find a higher tree Farther and farther I should see, To where the grown-up river slips Into the sea among the ships, To where the roads on either hand Lead onward into fairy land, Where all the children dine at five, And all the playthings come alive. In “Foreign Lands” from A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson paints a picture for us bigger people of just what is happening in the mind of the child who climbs that tree. What’s he doing up there? He’s looking. He’s imagining. My heart swells when I recall the early years with my children. Stevenson is brilliant. In his poetry he captures the beauty of childhood in verse: the playfulness, the youthfulness, the imagination. But he does more. For the mother who reads it aloud, he instructs: Listen, gentle Mother, this is how your …