Walking with Mr. Frost

Walking with Mr. Frost


Annie would take me for wear-out walks
Down stone-fenced roads lined with elder oaks.
Each day we’d meet a man,
who’d only grunt in passing.
He had deep eyes and a wrinkled face
Who seemed to belong in some other place.

Annie said he likely had
a poem on his mind.
He’d work out his words on his backroads jaunt.
Then go back home and write them down.
He was a great poet, said she, but more.
he was just a very nice man.

Carefully, for I was only five
I wrote out my ‘bestest’ one.
Blocking his path, held in grimy paw
Offered, saying I’m a poet, too.
He took his time. He read each word.
Then he handed it back to me.

Not yet you aren’t. Read poetry.
Learn a poem for when next we meet.
The whole thing, not just a line or two.
I’ve a trip to take, I’ll be gone a week.
Let me hear what you can do.
Let me hear you’re a poet too.

Annie read me several poems.
I couldn’t read that well, as yet.
I liked one with two paths in a wood;
We only had paved roads at home.
She read and read, I got the words down.
Never knew I was on a path less traveled.

He listened to my recitation.
He asked me what the poem meant.
He smiled at my answers. Said learn another
by some other gent.
Try Lewis Carrol or the man named Poe:
He’d see me again, he’d see what I know.

July was gone and now we’d sit
and read poetry in mapled shade.
He asked me to write a new poem—
But not about cats or about the weather.
I wrote ‘Whether or Not’ and he smiled out loud,
At what I saw in a passing cloud.

Years passed before I ever knew
That he was a very famous poet.
His miles long gone ere I read him in school
Yet his pathways were mine; though I didn't know it.
I still remember poems he had me memorize
in the heat of that summer touched by frost.