To My Mother

(Mother and Child by Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973,
Spanish artist)

After he finished writing his poems for children, entitled A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about them to a friend, noting that there was “something nice in the little ragged regiment . . . they seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly — not song, if you will, but a child’s voice.”

This is one of the poems from that collection.

TO MY MOTHER

You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scottish poet, novelist, and travel writer