Imagery Poems For Children

One way to develop the ability to create imagery, creating pictures out of words, comes from developing our imaginations.

If we can first learn how to "see" in our minds what we want to share, writing that mental image becomes easier. Writing lists of words that go with an idea wanted in a poem gives us starting points and threads to weave into the image.

Looking for imagery poems:

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Autumn Change


The autumn change
Brings out the range
Of colors bright and bold
A dying flicker of shiny gold
Before the hue is dead
Out springs Indian red
A scarlet so serene
Overcome by olive green
When the molten colors turn over
The time is now October
Orange speckles to the ground
With traces of hickory brown
Colors so simple yet also strange
Reflect the mystery of the season's change
- Mary O. Fumento, 1981



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Seen Through a Window - By David Ferry b. 1924 David Ferry




A man and a woman are sitting at a table.
It is supper time. The air is green. The walls
Are white in the green air, as rocks under water
Retain their own true color, though washed in green.
I do not know either the man or the woman,
Nor do I know whatever they know of each other.
Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color.

The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s
Self and strength, that bears, like weariness,
Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight
Bears heavily on itself to be itself.
Heavy the strength that bears the body down.
And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep.
The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds.

The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little
The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm
A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other,
Flowering in the white. Her staring eye,
Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood,
Says nothing of what it is but what it is.
Such silence is the bird’s cry of the stone.



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Talking Blues - By Calvin Forbes b. 1945 Calvin Forbes





Raccoon you better be cool

Thought I saw you on Broadway
Eating King Fish’s barbecue

Some people claim raccoon you pretty
Swear raccoon tame like a kitty

But raccoon bites you if you get too close

I saw raccoon on Lenox Avenue
Stealing milk from a baby

Thought I saw a black cat on the corner
But it was nothing but old raccoon

Raccoon let me school you

Raccoon you know you too country
You better leave the city

Raccoon they got rats in New York City
Big as you and just as ornery

Nobody in Harlem studying you raccoon
So you better go about your business

Raccoon you better get wise
Look what playing possum got the possum