Different But Together!: If I Was the Sunshine by Julie Fogliano

If you were the winter
and I was the spring
I’d call you whisper
and you’d call me sing.

Some things that are different go together, like sun and rain, oceans and boats, silence and sound, fireflies and dark, and even apples and worms!

And in the noted author poet Julie Fogliano's latest, If I Was the Sunshine (Atheneum Books, 2019), both nature and the concepts of alike and different  come together in opposite but complementary pairing as the subjects of her charming quatrains, simple verses which bring together unlike elements of nature in definite but delightfully arresting pairings.

If I were a bird
and you were a tree--
I'd call you home,
and you'd call me free!

Fogliano, winner of the Ezra Jack Keats' Award, writes poetry that is simple, but not simplistic, introducing youngsters to a depth of meaning that feels both right and surprising, logical, but moving, and with the help of the notable Caldecott artist Loren Long's lovely illustrations, this little poetry book has a lot to say about the rightness of the natural world. As School Library Journal sums it up, "The dance of words and pictures is lovely . . .."