John Kinney - Yellow Summer-Throat
The title of this series comes from Hilda Conkling’s poem “Yellow Summer-Throat”:
Yellow Summer-Throat
Yellow summer-throat sat singing
In a bending spray of willow tree.
Thin fine green-y lines on his throat,
The ruffled outside of his throat,
Trembled when he sang.
He kept saying the same thing;
The willow did not mind.
I knew what he said, I knew,
But how can I tell you?
I have to watch the willow bend in the wind.
Hilda Conking wrote all of her published poems between four and fourteen years of age. At six years of age, she published her first poem “Summertime” in Poetry.
When my youngest daughter was three or four, the Yellow Throated Warbler (or “Yellow Summer Throat”) was her favorite bird. To her, seeing something yellow flying in the sky was quite the sight. This was a bird I had seen hundreds of times, and I saw nothing special about it. This highlights how a child’s perception of the world is much different than an adult’s.
Thinking about how my daughter sees the world, I decided to get her suggestions for photographs. I got her input, in a sense, to achieve a naïve freshness to the photographic medium. She is not influenced by other photographers or photographic clichés. She is not worried about whether a photograph constitutes art. She does not know the rule of thirds, rule of odds, color theory, and the like. Thus, from her, I get ideas for photographs I would have never come up with, such as an acorn squash wearing a tinfoil hat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we review the photographs I took based on my daughter’s suggestions, there is a similarity with what she sees as intriguing and what the child poet Hilda Conkling wrote about. Thus, some of Conkling’s poems are presented here to complement some of the photographs.
Dandelion
O little soldier with the golden helmet,
What are you guarding on my lawn?
You with your green gun
And your yellow beard,
Why do you stand so stiff?
There is only the grass to fight!
Conkling, Hilda. Poems by a Little Girl. 2008.
The Dream
When I slept, I thought I was upon the mountain-tops,
And this is my dream.
I saw the little people come out into the night,
I saw their wings glittering under the stars.
Crickets played all the tunes they knew.
It was so comfortable with light . . .
Stars, a rainbow, the moon!
The fairies had shiny crowns
On their bright hair.
The bottoms of their little gowns were roses!
It was musical in the moony light,
And the fairy queen,
Oh, it was all golden where she came
With tiny pages on her trail.
She walked slowly to her high throne,
Slowly, slowly to music,
And watched the dancing that went on
All night long in star-glitter
On the mountain-tops.
Conkling, Hilda. Poems by a Little Girl. 2008.
March Thought
I am waiting for the flowers
To come back:
I am alone,
But I can wait for the birds.
Conkling, Hilda. Poems by a Little Girl. 2008.
Most parents will recognize these tiny cups for cold medicine. To parents, these are symbols of calling in to work to say you need to stay home with your child. I had put all these cups in a container, but my daughter took them out and just stacked them up. Interestingly, she did not feel the need to stack the cups straight. She just stacked them spontaneously and walked away. To me, her construction of these tiny cups illustrates how a child creates without constraint, creates freely. I might have just stacked these cups straight up; however, I never thought to stack them in the first place. I would like to point out here that she did a remarkable job at determining the ordered relationship of these cups in terms of size. This type of stacking has been studied extensively within the field of developmental psychology.
Fragaszy, Dorothy M., et al. "The sources of skill in seriating cups in children, monkeys and apes." Developmental Science 5.1 (2002): 118-131.
Oh, My Hazel-Eyed Mother
Oh, my hazel-eyed mother,
I looked behind the mulberry bush
And saw you standing there.
You were all in white
With a star on your forehead.
Oh, my hazel-eyed mother,
I do not remember what you said to me,
But the light floating above you
Was your love for your little girl.
Conkling, Hilda. Poems by a Little Girl. 2008.
The photograph of six pears pays homage to Muqi's painting, Six Persimmons. My daughter saw Muqi's image, collected these pears, painted a few and then drew the stems on the paper.
Butterfly
Butterfly,
I like the way you wear your wings.
Show me their colors,
For the light is going.
Spread out their edges of gold,
Before the Sandman puts me to sleep
And evening murmurs by.
Conkling, Hilda. Poems by a Little Girl. 2008.
In the United States, tinfoil hats are associated with conspiracy theorists who believe that wearing a tinfoil hat will repel mind control attempts or from being surveilled by ‘big brother’ or extraterrestrial life.9 Many may recall the memorable scenes in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs in which family members wear tinfoil hats due to aliens arriving at their home. However, my daughter does not know about these associations with a tinfoil hat; she just thinks tinfoil makes a funny hat.
"tinfoil hat, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/290690. Accessed 13 December 2020.