WEBVTT

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So I have a three-year-old
daughter or nearly

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three-year-old daughter.

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And my best friend
who happens to be

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a poet who shall remain
nameless begged me not to write

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any poems about kids forever.

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OK.

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Which he usually finds
exceedingly sentimental.

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So of course, I disobeyed
him immediately.

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But this is actually
not a poem about kids.

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It's really a poem about
the inside of my head.

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Which considering
the amount of time

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I was spending on the
playground, was deeply confused.

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It's called "Bewitched
Playground."

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The poem mentions the
Japanese haiku master Bashō.

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And there are two
lines in the poem that

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are actually lines
from his journal

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about the death of his mother.

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Bewitched Playground.

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Each could picture
probably with great care

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his brother drawing the corded
string of a cherry silk bag

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and mumbling to Bashō
above the keepsake.

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Pay your respects to
mother's white hair.

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Now your eyebrows look
a little white too.

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But all have turned instead
to watch this child, a girl,

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my daughter, an astute migrant
skimming the stream of days,

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toted wherever she wants to eat
the dirt of inattentive towns,

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to arm wrestle as with the
blind, and steal a stoic,

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shipping him home.

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All have turned and
run to her because she

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has a spider on her neck.

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She has seen herself though
blindfolded by a cloud.

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The sun is a yellow jacket
drowning in a cup of coffee.

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She carries a spider in her
hair, blonde and blonder,

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dear river.

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I explained in the class
today that there was also

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a line in that poem
that makes reference

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to a song by the
children's singer Raffi,

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which I was hearing
over and over again.

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It's the thing about the spider.

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That he kind of goes
there's a spider in her hair

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there in your hair.

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There's a spider in
her hair in her hair.

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There's a spider in her hair.

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So on.