
How quickly the summer goes. To adults it's gone in a flash. To kids, hopefully, the summer goes a little slower. I'd love to think that today's kids are like the kids of my youth, where summer stretched on and on and each day brought something new to delight in. Here's a poem about one of summer's surprises, molting--its fancy term is ecdysis:
Cricket JacketsThis poem is found in the collection A Jar of Tiny Stars: Poems by NCTE Award-Winning Poets [J 811.54 JAR].
by Aileen Fisher
The day a cricket's jacket
gets pinchy, he can crack it
and hang it on a bracket
as he goes hopping by.
He doesn't need a mother
to go and buy another,
he doesn't need a mother,
and I will tell you why:
Beneath the pinchy jacket
the cricket sheds with vigor
he has a new one growing
that's just a little bigger,
to last him till July.
And then, again, he'll crack it,
his pinchy cricket jacket,
and hang it on a bracket
as he goes hopping by.
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