Since it's also Poetry Month, I thought I'd share this beautiful book:
The Bat-Poet is about a bat who decides to stay awake during the day.
He creates poems about his experiences and recites them to others.
His bat buddies don't understand. The mockingbird criticizes them.
The chipmunk loves them and encourages him to continue though.
So he creates the last and best poem in the book, which is below.
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him.
He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting -
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies
Her sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and, echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it’s going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across.
Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others are all there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.
Add a link to your bat post to hang with the gang!
