Homespun Nursery Rhymes

   
     As I was pushing my three-year-old granddaughter in the swing at the park the other day, she urged me to push her higher and higher. “Make me fly, Gramma!” she insisted. So I did. I ignored the arthritis in my elbows and shoulders and gave that little girl wings. As she swung up toward the treetops into the wild blue yonder, a little rhyme bubbled out of me:

Fly high in the sky

Like a rocket

Bye-bye!

     My granddaughter asked me to repeat the ditty to her over and over and over again, a look of pleasure twinkling in her eyes. I could see it in her face as her imagination soared out ahead of her; she wasn’t swinging anymore, she was flying, speeding through space toward the moon.

     I’ve been making up rhymes and songs to mark the everyday joys and trials of childhood since my own girls were babies. Silly stuff, mostly, but part of the stock that my oldest daughter has included in her own repertoire and passed down to her kids.

     The lullaby for rocking a wee one to sleep:*

I love you baby

Oh, yes I do

I love you baby

And I’ll be true

When you’re not with me

Boo-hoo, I’m blue

Oh, baby

I love you

     A distraction sung while extracting stubborn residue from the nose of a child who has not yet learned how to blow:

I’ve got a great big ugly fat green booger

Up in my nose

Up in my nose

Up in my nose

I’ve got a great big ugly fat green booger

Up in my nose

Up in my nose to stay

I know my mommy doesn’t like it but she

Can’t get it out

Can’t get it out

Can’t get it out

I know my mommy doesn’t like it but she

Can’t get it out

Can’t get it out today

     A verbal embrace before the light is switched off at bedtime. A rhyme half-remembered from my own childhood and re-worked when my memory failed.

Good-night

Sleep tight

Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

But if they do

Cry boo-hoo

And I’ll come rescue you.

     As you can see for yourself, they are nothing clever like A. A. Milne, Shel Silverstein, or Jack Prelutsky. They are more comparable to some of those nonsense rhymes from Mother Goose. Perhaps that is how many of the nursery rhymes that are so familiar to us began, somebody’s mama or grandma blurting out irrepressible ditties about boogers and bedbugs that have been repeated so often they became lore. Homespun nursery rhymes.

     But if it can make a three-year-old fly, it is poetry.

taken from Bye Bye Birdie