I was born in the late 70’s and my mom used to recite a bedtime poem to us each night. I can remember three different verses:
Opening verse:
My house is cozy warm and wide.
It has the nicest things inside…
A knife, a fork, a yellow cup,
For drinking all my cocoa up…
Closing verse:
Outside my window I can see,
The moon and stars shine down on me.
Basically the poem was a tour of a child’s home. I believe there was a stop in the kitchen, bathroom then finally the bedroom. I don’t believe it was an original work, and seem to recall my mom saying that she got it from a book, although I don’t ever remember her reading it to us. She was born in the 50’s, so it could be from her childhood. My uncle (her youngest brother) was 10 years older than me, and it may have been a book from him that arrived in disrepair and so she memorized it to recite. My thought is that it is from a compilation/treasury of bedtime poems/rhymes/stories between 1950 and 1980. Googling hasn’t yielded anything. On a whim, I recently purchased Rene Cloke’s Bedtime Book to see if it was from there, but it wasn’t.
Thank you for any help you can provide! We lost our mom 4 years ago and I would love to find the source of this to share with my brothers and sister.
By Googling some of the lines you remember within quotation marks, I found the poem within a grainy PDF of an old pamphlet of “Saturday School” activities published by the federal Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education in 1974. (The copy scanned was owned by “the Ferguson-Florissant School District” in Missouri.)
The author isn’t given, but the title and full text of the poem are as follows:
A Poem About My House
Our HOUSE is cozy, warm, and wide.
It has the nicest things inside:
A KITCHEN where my mother cooks,
A SHELF with lots of PICTURE BOOKS,
A RUG that’s soft beneath my feet,
A TABLE where we sit to eat.
We’ve lots of CHAIRS for sitting in.
Some chairs are fat and some are thin.
My daddy’s chair is big and tall.
The one I use is rather small.
A DESK is where we sit to write.
We use a LAMP to give us light.
And there’s a MIRROR an the shelf.
I look at it and see myself!
I have a WASHBOWL and a TUB
Where I can play and splash and scrub.
My ROOM is white. My CURTAINS, red.
I have a DRESSER and a BED.
My mother tucks me in at night
And quietly turns out the light.
Outside my WINDOW I can see
The MOON and STARS shine down on me.
The URL of the PDF is: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED101835.pdf
“Adventures with Words” by Adelaide Hall, pub 1963
Gill,
Thank you so much! It was in Adventure with Words. This made my day! My sister and I were chatting tonight about my mom and this poem. It was a special time. Thanks for taking the time to let us know.