Swing Around the Sun - Barbara Juster Esbensen

POETRY
Illustrated by:
Cheng-Khee Chee (spring)
Janice Lee Porter (summer)
Mary GrandPre (fall)
Stephen Gammell (winter)
Carolrhoda Books, 2003 (original verse 1965)
48 pgs.
Endpapers: orange

Enjoy beautiful art from four very different illustrators while traveling through the seasons with twenty of Esbensen's (1925-1996) poems that include:

Storm

Day is Night!
The world is black;
The thunder snaps
With a splitting crack!

Beaks of lightning
Rip the air
And willows swing
Their streaming hair.

Threads of rain
Bind earth to sky;
The gutter’s torrent
Rushes by.

No house has shape,
No tree has form;
The town is lost
In summer storm!

Discovery

Within its polished universe
The apple holds a star,
A secret constellation
To scatter near and far.

Let a knife discover
Where the five points hide;
Split the shining ruby
And find the star inside!

Fireworks

The sky’s a fiery garden
That scatters in the breeze,
Vying with the fireflies
Glowing in the trees.

Spangling the darkness,
Velvety and deep,
The last exploding starfall
Crumbles into sleep.