The Things I Love
A butterfly dancing in the sunlight,
A bird singing to his mate,
The whispering pines,
The restless sea,
The gigantic mountains,
A stately tree,
The rain upon the roof,
The sun at early dawn,
A boy with rod and hook,
The babble of a shady brook,
A woman with her smiling babe,
A man whose eyes are kind and wise,
Youth that is eager and unafraid—
When all is said, I do love best
A little home where love abides,
And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 29, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Things I Love” appears in Scottie McKenzie Frasier’s debut poetry collection Fagot of Fancy (Progressive Publishers, 1920) and in her second poetry collection Things that Are Mine (Steen Hinrichsen, 1922). For Fagot of Fancy, McKenzie Frasier dedicated her book to her little sister Alleen and wrote the foreword, stating, “Once an art critic said: ‘The Realist paints things as they are; the Impressionist paints as they seem to him; and the Futurist paints things not as they are nor as they seem but as the Artist feels—the reaction upon the Artist’s heart.’ So these little verses are not according to the laws of Rhyme and Meter; they are not the product of labor but rather a spontaneous outburst—they were written in the same spirit as a child builds Golden Castles in Sunny Spain.”
Scottie McKenzie Frasier
