A Child's Bedtime Rhyme

Flower went flying by on the breeze.
He called to his friends, “Come play with me!”
Over the rooftops so steep and tall;
way up in the air. “Watch out! Don’t fall!”

He sailed to the rooftops; they followed behind,
way down in the street and away up on high.
He left them behind, he flew even faster.
They knew where he was by the sound of his laughter.

He was soon out of sight and all alone.
He looked around but couldn’t see home.
His friends were nowhere to be found,
so he sat on a doorstep and worried and frowned.

While Flower sat there feeling blue,
a dog came walking by the stoop
wagging his tail, not making a sound.
He was tracking a beetle he smelled on the ground

who had just escaped from a boy’s glass jar,
and was getting away, but hadn’t gone far.
And chasing down the two runaways,
that same little boy on short chubby legs.

An orange cat was napping on a carpeted ledge;
a mouse tiptoed silently right by her head.
Nothing dared disturb her slumber,
not even the distant crash of thunder.

The stormy wind swept about and in;
it caught little Flower up in a spin.
It carried him low and from side to side;
it went through a tree whose arms reached out wide.

He flew past a bird all snug in its nest.
He flew down the street past a postman next.
He flew through the city with a twist and a turn.
He flew by a statue and great golden urn.

He went by a library, then by a school.
He flipped upside-down; he felt like a fool!
He flew along at the whim of the breeze,
and then he was caught a little girl’s sneeze!

He rattled and shook and shifted and sobbed.
He hoped that his friends wouldn’t think he was odd
if they saw him dancing around like a tick.
Just then he fell as the wind did a trick.

Into Farmer Wilber’s pond he dropped.
He pulled himself through the muck and the slop.
At the edge of the pond he came nose to nose
with a rather respectable tuxedoed toad,

who, being well bred, was very polite
and gave him directions to get home before night.
Then, thanking the handsome and neighbourly toad,
he set out to trudge his way down the road.

When he finally climbed back into his box,
he found his friends (and they looked quite cross).
“Where did you go to? Where have you been?
We missed out on all of the wonders you’ve seen!”

Flower was sorry and he told them so,
“Now I’ll tell you all that I saw so you’ll know.”
They settled down in their sleepy beds,
tucked in their leaves and nodded their heads.

He told of the boy and the dog chasing the bug,
and the mouse sneaking by the cat on the rug.
He told of the thunder, the bird in the tree;
he told of the postman down in the street.

He told of his wild trip all through the town.
(But he left out the part where he flipped upside-down.)
When he told of the little girl’s sneeze, they laughed;
and how, with Toad’s help, he found home they clapped.

And when the story was finished they sighed,
“We wish we too could have been on the ride.”
While thoughts of his story turned to dreams in their heads,
they fell fast asleep in their snuggly warm beds.


Copyright © 1999 by Koreen W. Lang. Used by permission.