Poetry for Kids

I’ve always loved building snowmen. When my kids were younger, we used to spend whole winter afternoons rolling giant snowballs around the yard, hunting for the perfect sticks for arms, and deciding how he should be dresses and decorated. Which hat would work best? Should he have a scarf or a tie? Does he really need a carrot nose or would a button work just as well?

This year, I started thinking about how much personality a snowma...

I love writing poems about the holiday season, so I wanted to start December off with a new funny poem about Santa Claus. To get myself in the right festive mood, I reread Clement Clarke Moore’s classic poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” As I was reading, a couple of lines jumped out at me:

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his...

One question students often ask me is what my favorite “kind” of poem is. That is, they want to know if I like haiku or limericks or diamantes or some other type of poem best. The word poets use to describe these different kinds of poems is “form.” A form is kind of poem defined by a set of rules, which might include a certain rhyme scheme, number of lines, syllable count and so on.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t normally ...

Before we begin, there’s something I haven’t talked about very much. Most people assume I was born in the twentieth century and grew up like everyone else—going to school, learning poetry, all of that. But the truth is a bit more complicated.

I’m actually from the year 3017.

That’s right—thirty-seventeen. A full millennium in the future. Back home, time travel is fairly common. It’s not something people make a big fuss about, eithe...

It’s the middle of autumn, and the weather is definitely changing. The leaves have mostly fallen from the trees, and it’s been cold and raining for the past few days where I live. I thought I’d write something about this change of seasons—but in a slightly unexpected way.

This poem starts out as a simple bike ride through the park, but things take a strange turn once the weather begins to shift. Here is…

Dark Park

I went for ...

It’s October, and the weather has finally started turning cold. The leaves are changing colors and beginning to fall, swirling and spinning in the breeze. I’ve already written a couple of Halloween poems this month, so I thought I’d do something a little different, something that simply celebrates the season itself.

The idea for the ending of this poem came to me almost instantly, and I knew I had to write the whole thing just to b...

I came up with the last word of this poem earlier this year. It’s what’s called a portmanteau word, which means a made-up word created by blending two real words together, like combining breakfast and lunch to make the word “brunch.”

Now, at the time, it was the beginning of June, and writing a Halloween poem in the middle of spring didn’t make much sense. So I just jotted the word down in my notes and waited. Now that October is h...

When October comes around each year, I love writing Halloween poems—especially about monsters, haunted houses, and trick-or-treating. Some of these poems are a little spooky, but most are just meant to be silly and fun, like this one. I started imagining what it might be like if Dracula and his monster friends hosted a Halloween celebration of their own. What would they do if you came knocking on their door? I hope you enjoy the an...

One of the things I’ve loved ever since I was a kid is playing with language; making up silly words, twisting familiar phrases, and asking questions that don’t always have logical answers. I grew up reading nonsense poems like “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll and “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Edward Lear, and I still remember the tongue twisters and silly songs my dad used to recite, like “Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Be...