Just Call Her Little Nikki Giovanni: My Brown Baby Tries Her Hand At Poetry

Have mercy, school is over and there's an avalanche of graded papers, old school supplies, and random art/science/social studies projects cluttering literally every surface of the kitchen counters. Slowly but surely, I've been sifting through the collection with the hope that I'll have a stable of places to stash all of it sometime before August, when the kids go back to school. (Yeah, right. Jesus be a Container Store gift certificate so I can get a handle and a clue.) Anyhow, there are some pearls in the piles of papers that I'm seeing for the first time, and one touched my heart so that I just had to share it with you; it's a poem my Mari wrote in her 4th grade class. It's astoundingly beautiful (I say this not only because I'm her mother, but because it's really good); I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

MY SUNSET
By Mari Chiles

I dream of the sunset
My sunset
With seagulls flying high

I dream of the sunset
My sunset
A color spectrum in the sky

Angels floating around me
With the ocean as far
as the eye can see

I dream of the sunset
My sunset
That is what I dream.