Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

I’ve always enjoyed writing poems about characters who are a little… well… less than excellent at what they do. There’s something especially funny about someone who tries their best but still manages to get everything hilariously wrong. Over the years, I’ve written about a pirate who’s never seen the sea, a scientist who searches for things that don’t exist, an old west bank robber who always fumbles the loot, and many more kooky characters.

This time, I thought it would be fun to take on the classic mystery genre, but with a detective who isn’t exactly solving any mysteries. This is her story and I hope you enjoy it!

Annette the Detective

Annette the Detective is bad at detecting.

She doesn’t spot obvious, telltale signs.

She’s bad with disguises, like costumes and masks.

The criminals cheer when Annette’s on the case.

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt. One of my favorite things about writing poems is playing with language—especially when it comes to words or phrases that can mean more than one thing. Sometimes, we use expressions that sound perfectly normal… until you stop and really think about what they say. And when you do, well, they can start to sound pretty silly.

Today’s poem is one of those. It began with a common phrase you’ve probably heard before, and turned into something completely unexpected. Let’s see what happens when everyday language takes a very strange turn. This is…

The Sofa Ate My Father

My dad was on the sofa.

I’d never heard the sofa speak,

I yelled, “Hey, that’s my dad you ate!

“I didn’t mean to eat your dad.

“I’ll try to be more careful

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

This poem was inspired by another poet I greatly admire—Jack Prelutsky. I had been reading his poem “As Soon as Fred Gets Out of Bed,” which is a wonderfully silly poem that features underwear. That got me thinking, “Maybe it’s time I wrote an underwear poem too.”

I also remembered another poem Jack wrote years ago called “I’m Growing a Glorious Garden,” where the garden grows musical instruments instead of vegetables. That poem planted a seed in my imagination—what if something even stranger grew in the garden? And that’s when the idea of “The Underwear Tree” came to me.

So I sat down and started imagining a tree that doesn’t grow fruit or flowers, but instead produces all kinds of colorful, comical underpants. And once I started writing, I couldn’t stop giggling.

By the way, if you enjoy poetry about underwear as much as I do, some of my other favorites are Jack Prelutsky’s My Underdog Is Overweight, from It’s Raining Pigs and Noodles, and Karla Kuskin’s A Bug Sat in a Silver Flower, from her book Moon, Have You Met My Mother?

Now, let’s take a walk out to the backyard and see what’s growing on…

The Underwear Tree

Outside, in our garden, you have to come see

There aren’t any leaves on our underwear tree.

Some bloomers are blooming, some long johns as well,

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt. Today’s poem is all about a well-intentioned surprise that doesn’t go quite as planned. With Mother’s Day right around the corner, one young child decides to do something extra special—make breakfast and deliver it to Mom in bed. But sometimes, even the best ideas can turn into a bit of a mess. Stick around for a funny, food-flinging adventure called…

Mother’s Day Breakfast

I brought my mom Mother’s Day breakfast in bed.

The pancakes went flying and clobbered the cat.

A whole bowl of cereal spilled on the rug.

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

One of the things that I enjoy most about writing poems is playing with words—especially when a word sounds like something else entirely. Today’s poem is one of those where the idea came from imagining a mix-up… the kind of mix-up that might happen if you were shopping for something high-tech and got something completely unexpected instead. This is…

My Smelly Telephone

My telephone is smelly.

I thought I bought a smartphone

And so, I learned the hard way

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

Sometimes a poem begins with just a sound—two words that almost rhyme, or a funny phrase that gets stuck in my head. That’s what happened with today’s poem. I started playing with the sounds of two familiar words, and before long, I found myself wondering, “What if there were a place where people celebrated one of these things instead of the other?” Though the result may seem a little bizarre, I had so much fun writing it that I just had to share it. This is…

An Oyster Celebration.

There’s an Oyster celebration

They put their Oyster clothes on,

They watch the Oyster Day parade

They listen to the Oyster sermon

It might seem odd to you and me,

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

The seasons are changing, and it feels like winter is finally over—but spring hasn’t really started yet. Where my sister lives, people like to say they have only three seasons: summer, winter, and mud. I always thought that was a funny way to describe this in-between time of year, when the snow is melting, the ground is wet and messy, and everything turns to sludge.

So I decided to write a poem celebrating the muddy, splashy, sock-soaking season that comes right before the flowers bloom and the trees start to bud. For kids who love jumping in puddles and getting a little dirty, it might just be the best season of all!

Splash!

The snow is gone.

A spray of sludge

I stomp around

It’s such an awesome

Before new leaves

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

I wanted to write a poem about nature in the springtime, especially for young reader… kids in first grade. Spring is such a fun season to explore the outdoors—you never know what kinds of animals or colors you might see! So I thought it would be fun to create a simple, playful poem that includes both: a list of colorful animals that follow a child home like a parade of pets.

I hope you enjoy the rhythm, the rhyme, and the chance to imagine your own list of colorful animals you might like to have as pets!

I Went for a Walk

I went for a walk

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt

With St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I thought it would be fun to write a poem about the tradition of trying to catch a leprechaun and find his pot of gold. Many kids set leprechaun traps, hoping to outsmart the tricky little creatures. But I started wondering—what if, after all that effort, you didn’t catch a leprechaun at all? What if you ended up catching something much less exciting instead?

That idea made me laugh, so I decided to turn it into this poem. I hope it makes you laugh too—and that if you go searching for leprechauns, you have better luck than the narrator of this poem!

I Tried to Catch a Leprechaun

I went out on St. Patrick’s Day—

I saw a rainbow down the street

I hunted for a fairy fort

I even built a special trap,

I spent the whole day searching,

— Kenn Nesbitt

Welcome to Poetry4kids. I’m Kenn Nesbitt.

A publisher recently asked me to write a fun poem for first graders that would help build phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, recognize, and play with sounds in words. They wanted something that would show how syllables and sounds can be changed, moved around, and combined in new ways. I had a great time coming up with silly word mashups and actually wrote several different poems for them.

In the end, the publisher chose to publish one of the other poems I wrote, but I liked this one so much that I decided to share it on my website for kids to enjoy. After all, playing with words is one of the best ways to learn how they work! What kind of fun, mixed-up words can you come up with? This is…

Random Andy

Random Andy makes up things

He also made some candypants.

He made a monkeytoothbrush

— Kenn Nesbitt