My Sheep Is Being Sheepish
A Funny Wordplay Poem for Kids
From the book My Cat Knows Karate
My sheep is being sheepish.
My cat is acting catty.
My horse, of course, is sort of hoarse.
My bat’s completely batty.
My chicken’s plainly chicken.
My hare is fairly hairy.
My cuckoo’s truly cuckoo.
My mare is mainly merry.
My fish is frankly fishy,
and so my flea is fleeing.
My slug is somewhat sluggish.
My bee is simply being.
I have so many animals
and this is how they’re feeling,
except for one, who’s tons of fun:
My seal is on the ceiling.
— Kenn Nesbitt
Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Reading Level: Grade 3
Topics: Animal Poems, Wordplay
Poetic Techniques: Anthropomorphism & Personification, List Poems, Pun Poems, Wordplay
About This Poem
I think it's fun to play with words to see what kinds of silly things you can do with them. In this poem, I tried to see how many animals I could think of whose names (or homophones of those names) could be used as adjectives. Each line of the first four stanzas contains an animal and an adjective describing how they are acting or feeling. HINT: If you move your mouse over any of the underlined adjectives, you will see it's meaning. In addition to all the double-meanings, I also made use of internal rhymes (such as "my horse, of course" and "one who's tons of fun"), alliterations (such as "my mare is mainly merry"), assonance (as in "cat is acting," "sort of hoarse," and "slug is somewhat"), and puns (a mare has a "mane" and you catch fish with a "reel"). All in all, this poem was a lot of fun to write, and I hope you have fun reading it.
From the book My Cat Knows Karate
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