By Leaps and Bounds
Volume Two of The Seasons of Youth
Paperback: 69 pp.
Published: 2009
The second and third years of a child's life are filled with the extraordinary ordinary events that are steppingstone rites of passage: learning to walk and speak; reveling in play and mischief; enduring the travails of illness; growing familiar with the world beyond the house, where dogs, rabbits, and fireflies mesmerize curious eyes; taking part in adventures with mom and dad — vacations, holidays, visits to grandparents. In this second book of a five-volume series about his children, Louis Daniel Brodsky chronicles the progress of his daughter, as she grows by leaps and bounds, and the evolution of his family, which is soon to grow as well, with the birth of a second child.
PRAISE FOR A Gleam in the Eye: Volume One of The Seasons of Youth:
I enjoyed A Gleam in the Eye: Poems for a First Baby and felt I could see not only the child, but all children dreaming and concerned, nurtured and growing.
— Maya Angelou, author of I know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Never has a father celebrated the infancy of a first baby with such lyrical precision, and grave attention, with such delightful humor.
— May Sarton, author of Journal of a Solitude and In Time Like Air
BUY THE BOOK from Time Being Books (the publisher) or Amazon.com.
Budding Poetess
Conversations
That were staccato notes,
Not long ago —
Unsatisfactorily brief,
Like long-anticipated vacations
Or the changing of leaves in fall —
Lengthen.
Characterized by prolixity and weightiness,
Each becomes a debate
In which Trilogy asserts her autonomy,
Has her way,
Confirms, emphatically,
That she’s attained complete mastery
Of her twenty-six-letter inheritance.
Her tongue is a magnet for germane words.
Idioms and streetwise apothegms surface,
Without coercion.
She probes ideational forests,
Like a botanist in search of new species.
Free association sets the meter
For her wingless, bardic songs of ecstasy.
Speech is the joyous release
Of the collective unconscious
Reaching, generatively,
To leap all synaptic gaps.
Ancient rhythms and myths
Color her fanciful language,
With designs pristine in their simple complexities.
We listen to her voice
Free church bells,
And we marvel at the purity of their timbre.
The sonorous legato she’s achieved,
In moving from mere gestures,
Through obstinate syllables,
To the sound of the centuries,
Astounds us with its euphony.
Embedded in her ABC’s
Are the passwords to the castle
Where undreamed profundities sleep
And poetry never spoken
Waits to be aroused.
Someday, the kingdom will be hers.
