A hippopotamus
from top to bottom is
easy on the eye…
but only to other hippopotami.
To build a beast
like a wildebeest
use the highest quality manes and horns. If you do,
your wildebeest will be as good as gnu.
The owl
wears a scowl
without reason or basis.
It’s just the way his face is.
A cheetah
can beat a
tortoise in a race. So badly, in fact,
the tortoise would be shell-acked.
A rabbit
can temporarily inhabit
a hole some other rabbit let him borrow,
which is why a hare today may be gone tomorrow.
My humpback whale
put a mast and a sail
in his blowhole, and now when it’s breezy
he zips along at twice the speed while his fins just take it easy.
The snail
said, “I sail
at dizzying speeds and I breathlessly hurtle!”
as it rode on the back of a sleepy turtle.
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A critterhew is like a clerihew (a four-line biographical poem using uneven rhyming couplets) but with an animal name instead! The name ‘critterhew’ was invented by poet J.D. Smith.
*
Robert Schechter is the author of The Red Ear Blows Its Nose: Poems for Children and Others. His children’s poems have appeared in The Caterpillar, Highlights for Children, Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, The School Magazine, The Washington Post, The Spectator, Light, and Tyger Tyger, as well as numerous anthologies. His adult work has also been widely published and has won both the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. Robert is the judge of the Caterpillar Children’s Poetry Award for 2026.
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