Poems by a Little Girl

These are poems written by a girl between the ages of four and ten. Let that sink in. Hilda Conkling composed over a hundred verses capturing buttercups and moth wings, her mother's voice, the secret language of streams. There is no adult self-consciousness here, no striving for effect. Just a child speaking directly from the imagination, in images so fresh they startle. The natural world lives and breathes in these lines. Trees have opinions. Dreams are places you can visit. A mother's lap is the center of everything. Amy Lowell, in her preface, struggles to articulate what she's witnessing: a prodigy, yes, but more importantly, a window into a way of seeing that most of us forget we ever possessed. This is not a curiosity. It is a miracle of unguarded perception, as close as literature gets to the raw stuff of childhood thought.