<p>As a little girl, I liked the Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak - including Chicken Soup with Rice, One Was Johnny and Pierre (the little boy who didn’t care).
I also liked Tikki Tikki Tembo (story about the little boy whose name was too long).</p>
<p>There was another one about a little boy who was chased around a tree by tigers, the tigers went so fast they turned into butter, and then the mother made pancakes from the butter, but I am not remembering the name.</p>
<p>^Little Black Sambo. Not used now - politically incorrect.</p>
<p>A TISKET A TASKET (oh what Ella Fitzgerald could do for a nursery rhyme)
<a href=“Ella Fitzgerald - A-Tisket, A-Tasket - YouTube”>Ella Fitzgerald - A-Tisket, A-Tasket - YouTube;
Meriggiare Pallido e Assorto by Eugenio Montale
and almost anything by Yeats.</p>
<p>I love this thread- it got me looking at classic verses online- what warm memories flooded back. It’ll be a great conversation with my mom. </p>
<p>I still love All Creatures Great and Small and (a hymn) For the Beauty of the Earth. </p>
<p>Have my childhood copy of Little Black Sambo. The idea that the tigers ran so fast that they turned into butter-- I often think that when life is throwing too much at us or we have too many concepts to juggle or too much stimulation, it all turns into “a geat big pool of melted butter.”</p>
<p>My favorite old book of fairy tales includes the story of the Tar Baby. I don’t understand how it came to be seen as racist. Now, if a politician says something is a “tar baby,” there’s an uproar of righteous indignation, but it just means “a situation so sticky you don’t want to touch it”. Why?</p>
<p>^because it has also been used as a derogatory term for blacks- or dark-skinned folks in other parts of the world.</p>
<p>My favorite nursery rhyme is from a Beatrix Potter collection. Words to live by…</p>
<p>We have a little garden,
A garden of our own,
And every day we water there
The seeds that we have sown.</p>
<p>Invictus by William Ernest Henley. Probably doesn’t qualify as a nursery rhyme, but I love anything by Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.</p>
<p>When my kids were little I hardly knew any real nursery rhymes or lullabiesactually I still don’tso I would sing them the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and the Notre Dame Victory March at bedtime. They loved it. My daughter just turned 12 and still asks me to sing them to her at bedtime once in a while, which warms my heart.</p>
<p>Anyone have A Child’s Book of Poems (illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa) from late 60s/early 70’s?
This was one of my childhood favorites–I still have it–taped together/falling apart.</p>
<p>I like to memorize poems and used to recite them to my kids as they were falling asleep.
The Sugarplum Tree by Eugene Field is one of my/my kid’s favorites.
My f-i-l loved to recite poetry–he had whole books memorized. One of his favorite poems was Field’s “Little Boy Blue”-- (about a little boy who died, from the perspective of the toys he left behind. . .) He used to recite this poem to his mother–who had lost three infant/toddler sons before he was born-- and make her cry!</p>
<p>I like a lot of poems–here’s one I came across recently:</p>
<p>The Summer Day
Mary Oliver</p>
<p>Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?</p>
<p>atomom, I don’t have that but this has gotten me looking today at some old nursery rhyme, children’s books that I have. My youngest is 20 but after both kids got out of their public elementary school, I donated tons of kid’s books to their school. I kept some favorites, things that were inscribed. It was funny to see some titles again(books, not poems so somewhat off topic) that I hadn’t thought about in years-The Pea Patch Jig, Skip to My Lou. Sounds like other people have been digging out the old poems and books which is fun.</p>