Good Halloween Poems for Children

“There once was a witch of Willowby Wood,
and a weird wild witch was she …”
From Rowena Bennett’s “The Witch of Willowby Wood,” excerpted in Sing a Song of Popcorn

Many children’s books include a Halloween poem or two, but Sing a Song of Popcorn (Scholastic, 1988) has a half dozen in the spirit of Oct. 31. All six of these brief, lively, rhyming poems come from good writers and appear in a section called “Spooky Poems,” engagingly illustrated by the Caldecott medalist Margot Zemach. For children who dislike witches and ghosts, the book has Robert Graves’s “The Pumpkin,” which begins: “You may not believe it, for hardly could I: / I was cutting a pumpkin to put in a pie …” John Ciardi’s lively Halloween limerick, “The Halloween House,” appears in two children’s books discussed on Oct. 24, 2008 www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/10/24.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.