Today’s Poetry Friday is an oldie-but-goodie I posted ages ago. It’s one of my favorite types of poetry, the spontaneous playground sort.
Traditional Children’s “Counting Out” rhymes.
Inter mitzy titzy tool
ira dira dominu
oker poker dominoker
out goes you
Intery mintery cutery corn
apple seed and briar thorn
wire briar limber lock
five geese in a flock
sit and sing by a spring
O U T and in again
When I went up the apple tree,
All the apples fell on me,
Bake a pudding, bake a pie,
Did you ever tell a lie?
Yes, you did,
You know you did,
You broke your mother’s teapot lid,
L-I-D spells “lid”
And out goes you!
Monkey, Monkey, bottle of beer,
How many monkeys are there here?
One is far, one is near,
And you are the one
Who is out, my dear.
Wire, briar, limberlock,
Three geese in a flock,
One flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
The clock fell down,
The mouse ran around,
Scared all the people in the town—
And out goes she
With a dirty dishrag
On her knee!
– Author unknown
I ran across these and loved them, though I must say I don’t know to whose tradition they belong. I keep an ear out for counting rhymes because they always carry some sort of regional flavor that belongs uniquely to that neighborhood, that school district or that time. ‘Ol’ Mary Mac, all dressed in black, with silver buttons all down her back,’ asks her mother in one song for fifteen cents to “see the elephants jump the fence.” Elsewhere she wants to see “the presidents.” (Fence-jumping elephants, however, infinitely more exciting back in the day. From the number of people crowding the Capitol Mall last month, I’d say presidents are on the upswing again.)
One of my favorite from older years — is the chemistry rhyme, definitely started in a school somewhere:
Johnny had a little drink
But Johnny drinks no more
Because what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4.
You will now never forget the formula for sulfuric acid, will you?
Childhood. Strange days of spontaneous, playground poetry.
I remember my sisters and I weeping with laughter over my father’s childhood hide-and-seek counting chant, “Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco by the streetcar line…” and then hearing the words in a reggae song years later (not, sadly, followed by the shout, “Are ya’ll hid?”). We were sure he’d made that up, but apparently a Pensacola childhood is… like a reggae song? Who knows. Who knows…
There are more piquant and unexpected pleasures at Poetry Friday, hosted for the very first time at Elaine at Wild Rose Reader. Happy weekend to you, may you, in some way, rediscover a portion of childhood…