One of Robert Louis Stevenson's short dedication poems from A Child's Garden of Verses, written straight to his own mother. In four lines he asks her to read his rhymes and hear, once more, the sound of a child's feet on the floor. A gentle way to open the book, best read slowly.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor.
About this poem
Robert Louis Stevenson · From A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this, and it is barely a poem, more a note. It comes near the end of his 1885 book A Child's Garden of Verses, one of a handful of short 'envoys' addressed to the people he loved. This one is for his own mother, Margaret. He imagines her reading his rhymes and, for a moment, hearing his small feet running along the floor again, the boy inside the grown man who wrote the book.
It is only four lines, so use it as the last thing you read, a soft close to the session. Read it once as written, then again as though it were about you and your child, so they hear that you were small once too. Point at their feet at the last line. Ask whose feet they think they are.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition