Sky Pictures

By Effie Lee Newsome

Annotations by Karen Kilcup

Original 1940 woodcut for “Sky Pictures,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.

Sometimes a great white mountain
Or snowy polar bear
Or lazy little flocks of sheep
Move on in the blue air.

The mountains tear themselves like floss,[1]
The bears all melt away,
The little sheep will drift apart
As though they’d finished play.

And then new sheep and mountains come, 
New polar bears appear,
And roll and tumble on again
Up in the skies, blue-clear.

The polar bears would like to get 
Where polar bears belong.
The mountains try so hard to stand
In one place, firm and strong.

The little sheep all want to stop
And pasture in the sky.
But never can these things be done,
Although they try and try.

Newsome, Effie Lee. “Sky Pictures.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 143.

[1] Today many readers might think of dental floss, but here floss refers to a soft thread of silk or cotton used for embroidery.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, focuses on nature’s power to spark children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study

Claborn, John. “The Crisis, the Politics of Nature, and the Harlem Renaissance: Effie Lee Newsome’s Eco-poetics.” Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
“Effie Lee Newsome, 1885-1978.” Poets.org. This site provides access to seven of Newsome’s poems.
Newsome, Effie Lee. Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Courtesy of the New York Public Library, this site provides access to the entire text.

Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.