The Dirigible Balloon
Poetry for Children

Stuck

What an adventure under the lid
was the spinning of sugar the spider did
but now she exists in candy-floss woe
with all of her children stuck to her toes.

Woe in the toes! Oh multiple woe!
said the spider with seventy kids on her toes,
How can I unravel that spin I just did
under the yellow confectionery lid?

She tried to un-stick them by using her nose
but that just arranged them in long sticky rows,
from shoulders to elbows right down to eight feet
as her seventy children got more and more sweet.

Then her legs stuck together in seventy places
like licorice bows with seventy faces:
and soon they rolled into a gobstopper ball
so you couldn’t see how they were spiders at all.

They rolled and they plopped into my cup of tea
(I’d forgotten it -- so it had colded, you see)
I thought they were tea leaves as they swam apart --
then they swung from the handle down to my jam tart!

About the Writer


Fiona Russell Dodwell

Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell) loves writing for children. She has had children’s poems published in The Caterpillar, York Mix and Under the Basho. So far she has mainly written for adults – her first poems were published in Ink Sweat & Tears, and her most recent visual poetry has found homes in OSMOSIS and VOLT (USA). She enjoys composing visual poems with children from words generated during scrabble games