Prehistoric Poems for Dinosaur Devotees

Oh sure, a CGI dinosaur eating someone on the toilet is great, but have you ever read a POEM about a dinosaur? There’s no limit to how scary a poet can make a monster, no rubbery claws or clumsy greenscreen behind the leathery wings. We can only meet these monsters in our imaginations and, liberated from the constraints of prose, poets can paint a particularly vivid picture.

In ‘Dinosaurs Walked Here’, Elli Woollard uses heavy language and rhyme to echo the smashing of huuuuge feet into the earth:

            ‘Dinosaurs walked here once.

            Here, right here, on the site of this street,

            they’d stamp along, and the slabs of their feet

            were as wide as a car, crushing, crashing

            a road through the reeds. Then, striding and splashing,

            they’d thud in the mud of the deep green pool

            and they’d clomp in the swamp under new-forged skies

            where now the cold grey concrete lies.’

When I talk to children about dinosaur poems (more about my school events here), I love to use Cheryl Pearson’s poem ‘Kronosaurus.’ Its skull was as long as two eight-year-olds, so it’s always fun to ask for volunteers to lie head-to-head to demonstrate just how enormous that terrifying jaw really was. The poem asks us to imagine

            Thirty feet of brute strength

and teeth, faster than a shark,

snap snap snapping at your heels

            in dark water.

(I’d definitely skip this particular swim. That’s me on the beach, reading poems with dry feet.)

I asked my seven-year-old – a palaeontologist in training – to choose some favourite dinosaur poems and explain why she loved them. Little explanation was needed as to why she loved Laura Mucha’s ‘Apatosaurus Rap’… wait for that thunderous B O o O o o O o o o O o o o o O o M! You can hear Laura and friends reading the poem here.

Her favourite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus Rex, so she also post-it noted Paul Cookson’s ‘The King of All the Dinosaurs’ who ‘rants and raves and royally roars’ and ‘stomps and chomps on forest floors’ and ‘Gouges, gorges, gashes, gores…’ – this one is just so much fun to read aloud and, in my opinion, definitely calls for stomping for emphasis.

‘The Night Flight of the Pterodactyl’ by Chrissie Gittins also found favour. She liked the ‘glistening and gleaming’ Pterodactyl as it glides dangerously through the dark sky, moonbeams flashing on teeth and claws. Not a good night to be an unsuspecting sleeping frog in the shadow of those vast wings…

I was thrilled last term when my daughter came home from school bursting with excitement about Mary Anning, who is a hero to her now. Jan Dean’s gorgeous, evocative poem ‘Remembering Mary’ threads us back in time to her discoveries at Lyme Regis:

            The sea’s mysterious –

            iron grey and shunting shingle,

            growling with the roll

            of pebbles pounding in the tide.

            This same long roar that fills us

            as we beachcomb

            this same long rolling roar

            was sounding when Mary walked

            below Black Ven.

            It is the song that shapes the world

            this echoing roar of dinosaurs –

            the song of rocks and sea.

I really enjoyed hunting down dinosaur poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and I also love the Emma Press anthology Dragons of the Prime. And I haven’t quite left terrible lizards behind as Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems, includes plenty of dragons…

This article originally appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog.