The Summer’s Nearly Over
The summer’s nearly over and
the autumn’s coming soon
so I put a pair of pennies
in a helium balloon.
I also took a nickel
and attached it to my drone
and a dime went on a Frisbee
that I hadn’t ever flown.
I made a paper airplane and
I used some glue and strings
to attach a couple quarters to
the paper airplane’s wings.
I found a fifty-cent piece and
I tied it to my kite,
then I took them to the park today
and launched them all in flight.
I thought I ought to tell you so
that you would be aware
that the summer’s nearly over now
and change is in the air.
— Kenn Nesbitt
Copyright © 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Reading Level: Grade 4
Topics: Seasonal Poems
Poetic Techniques: Alliteration, Idioms, Narrative Poems, Pun Poems
Word Count: 121
About This Poem
Sometimes I like to write funny poems based on idioms, which are phrases that mean something different than what the words actually say. For example, if I say “it’s raining cats and dogs,” I don’t mean actual pets are falling from the sky! I just mean that it is raining really, really hard. In this poem, I played with the idiom “change is in the air.” Usually, it means that something new or different is coming.
In this case, it means that the season is changing from summer to fall. But I also made it funny by talking about actual coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters) being sent into the air on a balloon, a drone, a Frisbee, a paper airplane, and a kite. So, the final line has a double meaning: it talks about both the end of summer and actual coins flying in the air!
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