Tuesday, April 12, 2011

DINOSAUR DUNG: My Original Poem over at GottaBook


Just in case you haven’t heard—Gregory Pincus is featuring 30 Poets in 30 Days over at his blog GottaBook during National Poetry Month again this year. Today, I’m the featured poet. I sent Gregory several poems from my unpublished collection titled Docile Fossil. He chose to post Dinosaur Dung, a humorous rhyming poem. I recommend you stop by for a visit at GottaBook and read all the previously unpublished poems written by many well-known poets. Here is a list of the authors whose poems have already been posted at GottaBook: Marilyn Singer, Janet Wong, Joseph Bruchac, Avis Harley, April Halprin Wayland, Graham Denton, George Ella Lyon, Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, Jaime Adoff, Susan Marie Swanson, and Douglas Florian.

Here are a few poems from my collection Docile Fossil that I posted previously at Wild Rose Reader. How Come? is a poem of address and Dragonfly and Pterodactyl’s Wish are mask poems.


How Come?

Woolly mammoth

Big
Behemoth

Prehistoric pachyderm,

What did you in,

You hairy hulk?

A teeny tiny

Infinitesimal

Microscopic

Deadly germ?

A miniscule bacterium?

Hmmm?

Elephant is still extant…

Hippo, rhino, tiny ant,
Kinkajou and caribou…

Gnat and gnu are living, too.


How come you
And mastodon

Are D-E-A-D

Dead and gone?


T. Rex: A Glutton for Punishment

Oh! T. Rex was a greedy beast.

Each and every day he’d feast
On steamy stegosaurus stew,

Toasted pterodactyl, two

Tons of brontosaurus steak

And slurp up nearly half a lake

With all its prehistoric fishes—

Which he considered most delicious.

No vegetarian dinosaur,

He ate his brother’s posterior.

Digestive track on overload,

And belly bulging, T. Rex strode.

He searched the forest, thunder-toed,

For allosaurus a la mode

With heaps of whipped triceratopping,

Which he gobbled up. Then flopping

Down beneath a tree to rest,

Groaned and moaned and beat his chest.

He had to pause and take a break

Because he had a tummy ache.


Dragonfly

Long, long ago

before dinosaurs
roamed the land

I flew through prehistoric skies,

my glassy wings glistening in sunlight.

Long, long ago

I printed my image
in mud,

then melted into Earth’s memory.

Now

you can see me
stenciled on the stony pages

of time.


Pterodactyl’s Wish

I’m pterodactyl. I’m extinct.

I’m just a fossil now…
A relic of Earth’s ancient past.

I wish that I knew how

To break these rocky bonds

Which keep me trapped in days of yore

So I could flap my stony wings

And fly again once more.


Wild Rose Reader National Poetry Month Posts with My Original Poems

MINNOW MUSIC: An Original Mask Poem (This post includes some of my other animal mask poems too.)

A Passel of Space Poems

GOING BUGGY!: Original Insect Poems

TWOSOMES: Love Poems from the Animal Kingdom…and Some Original Cuddly Creature Couplets

Rhyming Acrostics

6 comments:

  1. I could have so used these poems for my dinosaur pajama story time. My favoroite is "How Come?"

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  2. I'm telling ya... you gotta get that collection out there! It's all fantastic.

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  3. They are great, such clever wording too. I enjoyed the 'dung' poem also. I wish I had had this book when I taught primary students.

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  4. Your poems are amazing, top-notch. Gregory is right - hurry up and finish up the collection and publish it so we can all buy your book!

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  5. Ditto to what everyone else said. What a great collection!

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  6. Dinosaur Dung has been my second grade students favorite poem so far this month! It was so timely as just the day before we were reading a book by Steve Parker: It's a Frogs Life and in his glossary he defines dung in a very funny way and then you came out with a whole poem about it! Fantastic.

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