Breena Clarke's Blog: A Few Whiles - Posts Tagged "honey"

"Honey, I Love" by Eloise Greenfield is a classic - a lovely collection of poems for young children that touches upon a wide range of feelings and experiences with the gentle, nurturing guidance of a favorite aunt. Consider this book the next time you're looking for a quiet classic for a young child. Author of biographies and fiction for children, Eloise Greenfield has created the world of an African American child's daily life that, with charm, intelligence, sensitivity and a deep understanding of what motivates and engages young children, does not exclude any child -- of any color or gender. The illustrations are by the award-winning children's illutrators, Leo and Diane Dillon. There is a quiet, intimacy in the spare drawings that, nevertheless, also includes complex, iconographic yet child-like depictions. This is a grand little book!

I have an intimate connection to this small book. I created a performance piece for children aimed for an audience of children and their people with these poems. The performers were all young people including my three year old son, Najeeb. He learned his poem by repeating it because he'd yet to learn to read. We worked on the blocking together. He had his own ideas about how his body should move in company with the words. The production was successful for the children who performed and the children who were the audience. I look back and consider that the others in the cast, also quite young, accomplished all of the poems and performed them excellently. The author, after an initial ruffle over permissions (I was not careful enough), attended the performances and was quite pleased.

I have a sweet, little signed copy. Eloise Greenfield was very generous in her remarks. I also have the signture of the young girl who had the lead though it is only a first name and my memory has failed to cough up her last name.

My son has since died -- very young, very accidentally, but I will always be able to savor his performance of Ms. Greenfield's poem, By Myself.

By Myself

By Eloise Greenfield


When I’m by myself
And I close my eyes
I’m a twin
I’m a dimple in a chin
I’m a room full of toys
I’m a squeaky noise
I’m a gospel song
I’m a gong
I’m a leaf turning red
I’m a loaf of brown bread
I’m whatever I want to be
An anything I care to be
And when I open my eyes
What I care to be
Is me

--- from the collection, "Honey, I Love," by Eloise Greenfield, 1978, Thomas Y, Crowell Company, New York.