As part of homeschooling we are doing Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization by Andrew Pudewa. I added a few poems to his selection, and The Flying Squirrel by John Gardner which I found in Eric Carle’s Animals Animals, is a favourite with the children. You can almost feel the squirrel flying past one’s ear the way they say – Into empty a i r, spreading every h a i r. .
The Flying Squirrel
by John Gardner
The Flying Squirrel is crazy.
Though he has no feathers (much less wings),
He scampers up into the tallest tree
And cries, “Toot-toot! I’m a parachute!”
And away off the highest branches he springs
Into empty air, spreading every hair,
His arms and legs spread wide to the side,
Till he lands with a thump that’s almost quite …
Admire it child, but don’t try it.
This week’s Poetry Round-up is being held at The Miss Rumphius Effect.
I love this! It’s a great one to be read out loud, isn’t it?
Ah, I found you through osi and not Poetry Friday. Wonder how I missed this. Yes, I feel the flight. Wonderful energy here.
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that is soooo kool i want 1
I Love squirrels!!!!
and this poem is awesome!
Hi.
Brian Je here in Australia. I am a pastor.
So many touching poems in you blog. Good!
I wonder where you took the squirrel. So real!
I would like to use this for my book called ‘Biomimetics for children’.
I will certainly quote the source.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Hi Brian. Thanks for the poetry praise. To be honest I found the picture of the flying squirrel through google images and pasted it in my blog before I was aware of copyright and etiquette issues. I’m not quite sure how to trace the original source. If you do a google image source you might find it appearing twice and the other one is probably the original source.