.

Story Time

The father, he sits on the couch with a book,
A child in each arm, and one more on his knees;
The mother, the same.  All the other ones look
Content on the floor; he recites like a breeze.

He changes his voice for each character’s lines,
Whether child or lion or grandma or elf,
And changes his face as an actor designs
When quotation marks signal to be a new self.

As he acts, all the listeners picture the scenes
While the words are transporting them all many places.
The images show on their own mental screens:
The farmhouse, the castle, the characters’ faces.

These books are their movies, their history tome,
Their lessons in civics, religion, and right,
And bonding together with family at home.
Light fades while they’re listening, night after night.

After ten thousand nights touring narrative trails,
The decades have vanished, the children are grown,
And all look back fondly on a thousand great tales;
They continue the story-time nights with their own.

First published in New English Review

.

Story’s End

The family’s together at Babbling Brook,
The couple’s found love, and the villain’s defeated.
In their village, my presence no longer is needed
Because I’ve just come to the end of the book.
Every day after work, I spent hours with the Browns
Wandering by creeks and old sheds and in castles,
Visiting families with children in passels,
Going to jousts, county fairs, other towns,
Outwitting the villain, and saving the folk,
But I’ve reached the last page, and the hero’s won glory.
No way could I stay; there will be no more story—
The scene’s disappearing as though it were smoke!
It’s text on a page, nothing actual there—
I leave Babbling Brook and return to my chair.

I leave Babbling Brook and return to my chair,
Where the tables are cluttered and no one is present.
No friends can be found, all my neighbors unpleasant,
And the women are busy not “washing their hair.”
The twilight is fading, the hills have gone black,
I turn on the lights, and I close every curtain;
My roommate is Loneliness, that much is certain.
I remember the story and long to go back
To farms with big families, a happier age
Of castles and white knights on quests and court jesters.
I’m losing my battle as Loneliness pesters!
My shield is my book, where I read the first page
To return to the world that the author forsook,
Where the family’s together at Babbling Brook.

.

.

Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Verse Virtual, and The Asahi Haikuist Network, and his short fiction has been published in Nanoism and The Creativity Webzine.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


Trending now:

24 Responses

  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    “Story Time” is my family story as I read to my children and used many different voices and accents like those of Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit. The emptiness exhibited in the second poem is one that now engulfs me, but I am content with life knowing I did the best I could for my children who are now in far off places. I appreciate such sentimental poems that have an impact on my mind.

    Reply
    • Cynthia Erlandson

      I remember my dad reading Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear with the very theatrical voices with which I’m sure they were meant to be read (and my dad was hardly a theatrical man!) We were delighted to hear their wonderfully fun stories! Unfortunately, I’m quite sure that these Brer’s been censored by the “educational” censorship complex (along with many other great classics).

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, everything that isn’t modern and woke is somehow racist, but the woke consider it quite all right to cancel these folktales from actual black Americans, just as they insisted on canceling Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Roy. That sounds great! My father read to me and my mother all the way into my college years… he was too serious to read dramatically, but I have no such objection. When I did the reading, I imagined voices for all the characters and imitated them, like an actor playing all the characters.

      Reply
  3. Phil S. Rogers

    I found Story Time very personal, loved it. Brought back many good memories. Thank You.

    Reply
  4. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Josh, as a voracious bookworm who has spent many years with her nose buried between pages, these two beautifully written and aptly paired poems speak to my heart. The magic and marvel of words is captured in both poems. Imagination is a huge gift that is nourished by books. “The images show on their own mental screens:/The farmhouse, the castle, the characters’ faces” captures the benefit of firing a child’s imagination beautifully. I especially like your use of “mental screens” – far better than screens children’s eyes are usually glued to. Yet, there’s a flip side… living one’s life through the tale of a happy-ever-after book because real life is too lonely to contemplate is a tough place to be. I like the form used in “Story’s End” – the repetition is striking and effective.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thanks, Susan! I’m glad you like them so much. They’re both based on my own experience growing up with books. The form of “Story’s End” is a two-sonnet corona, but with the meter changed.

      Reply
  5. Cynthia Erlandson

    These are charming! You’ve done a really good job of telling a story about telling stories. My favorite thing about being a mother of young children was just this: reading them stories. I’m afraid so many of our good traditional stories are being lost now, with people who weren’t read to, and so don’t read to “their own”, either.

    Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    You recall wonderful memories of “honey for a child’s heart,” Joshua. My children had daytime stories with me and evening stories with Dad. and so many kinds! Mother Goose, myths, fairy tales, Bible stories, all the saints’ lives Mary Fabyan Windeatt ever wrote, the complete works of Beatrix Potter, Robin Hood, Charlemagne, and Winnie the Pooh. The books either wore out or got passed on to younger families as the children grew. You may be interested to know that my most important mentor in poetry, Helen Vendler, wrote an important article advocating reading (in every possible active and passive mode) as the mainstay of education. She favors just enough math to gain computational skills, but otherwise it should be reading, reading, reading. Reading is the gateway to other subjects that need not be taught in themselves until very late in the educational process. As you can imagine, education experts were horrified, especially as the taste of children and parents was to choose the bulk of the reading material, which could be different for each child.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Margaret. I plan to read those exact same kinds of stories when I have children.

      When I started self-educating in the humanities, I came across Charlotte Mason, who advocated what you describe with Helen Vendler. The difference was that Mason insisted on good books and not “twaddle” (to use her word), with which I agree. A 19th-century Protestant pastor, warning people about the trashy novels of the day, wrote “Had a wise parental restraint been placed upon the youthful reading of the writer of these columns, it would have added no little to the equanimity, happiness, and usefulness of his life.” Given much of what I read in childhood when I chose my own books, I have to agree with him.

      Reply
  7. C.B. Anderson

    These poems, Joshua, could easily be taken as a critique of contempory (v. traditional) education. Your well, always overflowing, irrigates your neighbors’ fields.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, C.B. That’s quite a compliment. I’m honored.

      Reply
  8. Brian A. Yapko

    I really enjoyed both of these poems, Josh, both for their excellent workmanship as well as for the sweetness of the first and the pathos of the second. “Story Time” is as charming as a Norman Rockwell painting and seems to hearken back to that lost era when family togetherness was prized. Your poem is a reminder of what a terrible price our society has paid for digital convenience and the elevation of narcissism over family values. It is heartening to read at the end that the children, now grown-up, carry the tradition of story-time forward to their own children. I hope this is more than fantasy.

    “Story’s End” offers up a smile and a tear. “Babbling Brook” sounds idyllic and who wouldn’t want to spend time — perhaps a lifetime — there? I was reminded of the old Twilight Zone episode “Next Stop at Willoughby” in which an ordinary commuter train mysteriously takes a harried Manhattan businessman back to the rural, wholesome Americana town of his youth. I won’t spoil the ending, but my point is how such an imaginary place can draw our wounded hearts towards something better, whether it is Babbling Brook or Middle Earth, Camelot, Oz or Narnia or a hundred other places. It is sad that the subject of the poem is lonesome and relies on the joy provided by that book, I think we’ve all been this poem’s subject at one time or another. But you tap into something bigger: the magical spark of inspiration and sustenance that literature can provide!

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Brian! I’m glad you enjoyed them so much. I think the ending of “Story Time” is realistic, because my parents read to me, and I plan to do the same when I have children.

      I remember that Twilight Zone episode. The speaker of “Story’s End,” of course, feels the same way as the character from that episode, and yes, we’ve all been there. Such is the modern world.

      Your description of these books drawing our hearts toward better things reminds me of the end of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, when the boy has returned home from the fantastic world described in the book:

      “Milo walked sadly to the window and squeezed himself into one corner of the large armchair. He felt very lonely and desolate as his thoughts turned far away—to the foolish, lovable bug; to the comforting assurance of Tock, standing next to him; to the erratic, excitable DYNNE; to little Alec, who, he hoped, would someday reach the ground; to Rhyme and Reason, without whom Wisdom withered; and to the many, many others he would remember always.

      “And yet, even as he thought of all these things, he noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep green. Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day.

      “And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know—music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real. His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new—and worth trying.

      “Well, I would like to make another trip,’ he said, jumping to his feet; ‘but I really don’t know when I’ll have the time. There’s just so much to do right here.’”

      That’s what’s supposed to happen after we read a good book.

      Reply
  9. Joseph S. Salemi

    Both of these touch upon the absolute value of the spoken word and the printed page, and how crucially important they are for young children, as Margaret mentions. Oral culture is primary, but written culture provides children with a countless resource of tales from the entire world.

    In grade school, when I was eight years old, one of our assigned collections of selected stories contained John Ruskin’s “The King of the Golden River, or The Black Brothers.” This fairy tale of good, evil, love, selfishness, destruction, and final restoration had an effect so profound on me that to this day I cannot re-read it without having an intense emotional experience.

    Today, there wouldn’t be a snowball’s chance in Hell that the story would be printed in a public school reader.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Joe. I read that story too; it was great. The stories I read in public school were very low quality as you describe. The good ones mostly came from my parents.

      Reply
  10. Paul A. Freeman

    Storytime really resonated, though it was only myself and my brother and later my sister being read to, rather than the eight or more children in the narrator’s family.

    One of my profoundest memories is being read The Pied Piper by my mother before being dropped off for my first day at primary school and even then being terrified by the ending of all these children being taken away by a stranger, never to be seen by their parents again. Probably not the best pick of story before your kid starts school.

    Mind you, I wasn’t phased by The Three Little Pigs, where back in the day the wolf got boiled to death in a cauldron of water after consuming two of the pigs. These days all the pigs survive and the wolf leaps out of the boiling water and escapes up the chimney.

    Also, back in the day, Dr Seuss was unknown in the UK. One night though, looking for something to read to my sister when my parents were out, I found The Cat in the Hat in her 1974 Bunty Annual and was mightily impressed.

    Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Joshua.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Paul. I’m glad you liked it.

      I actually think you were right, in a way, about “The Pied Piper.” Schools have always worked very hard to sever the bond between children and their parents so they could teach them a more Marxist ideology; even early 20th-century Communists had explicit plans to do this.

      You may recall Susan’s poems on the latest iteration: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/06/28/poems-on-sexualizing-school-children-by-susan-jarvis-bryant/

      Next thing you know, people will insist the Pied Piper wasn’t a bad guy because the children consented to him giving them what they wanted.

      Reply
  11. Shamik Banerjee

    These poems follow a light-hearted approach, carefully embedding the bittersweet familial moments among the lines and stanzas. Sometimes, such poems are all that one needs for the health of his heart. Thank you Joshua for these beautiful poems.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.