We continue celebrating poetry month with another poem! This  week I want to expose you all to a new book in our collection called Grumbles from the Town: Mother-Goose Voices with a Twist by Jane Yolen and Rebecca Kai Dotlich. As you can gather from the title, the poems in this book are all based on traditional Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, but they tell the stories from a different point of view. Like this one, based on “Ring Around the Rosie”:

The Rosebush Grumbles (Again)

Every day it is the same:
the children play the Rosie game.
They dance around me in a ring
and they begin to chant and sing.
It’s much too loud, my roots get sore,
and still they sing and dance some more.
My stems grown thorny; my petals fall.
I do not like their song at all.
It’s simply such a boring sound,
I with that they would all stay down.

(Grumble, mumble, fumble, yawn,
I wish they’d just get off my lawn!)