A goldfinch and a stork sit gossiping and suspect the shining Sun of keeping huge ovens at home — ovens in which it bakes the sweet fruit you love, the ears of wheat in the field and the vegetables, year after year. This lofty star gives us, as we said, the long-awaited warmth and the clear light as well.
With this poem we opened the educational workshop at after school, in which we learned about the Sun and its role.
The image of the ovens does, in a handful of lines, exactly what a whole lesson would demand: it links the Sun to the food on your plate. A child knows that fruit ripens but rarely wonders who does the baking. And from there it is not far to the seasons, to how plants grow and to why nothing grows in winter.
We talked about the two things the Sun gives us, the two the poem names at the end: warmth and light. They are so constantly present that they become invisible — which is precisely why they deserve an hour in which they are looked at as something that could, in theory, be missing.
The poem stayed with them better than the explanation, as usual. Rhyme is the oldest memory trick we have and still one of the best.