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A tale of two children both short and yet tall,
Who discover a land where things are quite small.
There was a Jeannie sort of a girl and a Billy sort of a boy,
Who discovered one day a marvelous and shiny old sort of a toy.
The bright morning sun made the glass seem so shiny,
And when Billy looked through it things really seemed large that were really quite tiny.
Well, Billy and Jeannie decided right there and right then,
To hop through the glass before you could count up to ten.
With a hop and a skip and a jump and a slide,
They slid through the glass to where the little things hide.
When they had turned and looked up behind them,
The glass seemed as high as a snowy-capped mountain.
The grass that was green and had seemed oh so small,
Had suddenly come to be incredibly tall!
Alas the young children started to cry,
When they saw that the sky was so awfully high.
But soon all their fears were replaced with an awe,
When they saw all the newness in this world that they saw.
What a marvelous and wonderful world we have found,
A world full of mystery so close to the ground.
When Billy and Jeannie had looked far and near,
They discovered some animals that seemed a bit queer.
Round a mound of some soil came an animal that,
Looked to be as tall as a big alley cat.
It was a really strange cat they saw crawling about,
With ten jointed legs and an odd looking snout.
It was bright pretty colors and had really long ears,
With its tail ‘tween its legs it looked more than just queer.
Billy knew how to read and took a book wherever he’d go,
So he could find out the things that he wanted to know.
He opened the pages to look for this cat they had met,
And he read out to Jeannie the things that it said.
“In my book of things that are close to the ground,
This is a springtail and not a cat that we’ve found.
It says in the book that they’re really quite small,
As big as a speck of dust and that’s just about all.”
You see they had to remember of things that they saw,
That they were really MUCH smaller than they actually saw.
The next creature they spied seemed like an eight-legged dog,
It was made of red-velvet and was as fat as a hog.
It was scurrying about just looking for food,
As this is what most animals regularly do.
The things it was eating were shiny bright balls,
That were stuck to the grass by the edge of the soil.
Jeannie asked, “What in the world is that,
That’s so red and so round and so pleasingly fat?”
“My book says that’s not a dog crawling out of our sight,
But rather a little red velvet spider mite.
Remember those bright shiny balls near the ground?
Those were the eggs of some insect he was gobbling down.”
Billy and Jeannie stood there in wonder as they looked all around,
When they felt such a shaking throughout all of the ground.
There was a sound like a stomping of a thousand feet,
When around from some grasses came a millipede.
He seemed as long as a long station wagon,
And he moved with such ease, not a foot was he draggin’.
All on his sides were spots of bright red,
But the rest was all black from his tail to his head.
As he came rather close to where Jeannie and Bill stood,
He stopped dead in his tracks as only a millipede could.
Bill said to Jeannie he had an idea,
“If we hopped on his back we’d have nothing to fear.”
With a quick look to their right and then to their left,
In the wink of an eye to his back they had leapt.
When Jeannie and Bill landed the millipede started and ran,
And he ran about as fast as a millipede can.
He ran and he scurried through the mounds of dark earth,
He ran and he hurried for all that he was worth.
Finally Billy and Jean slid off his back as he continued to run,
And found they had landed back where they’d begun.
Beside them was that glass oh so wide,
And Jeannie and Bill thought of things over on the other far side.
So Jeannie took Billy by the hand and gave a little charge
And soon they were standing back in the world of the large.
When they turned and looked down in the grass,
On the ground just below them lay the magical glass.
Billy got down on his knees and picked up the glass,
To see if he could see anything deep down in the grass.
Jeannie pointed to dots just off to her right,
One of them was red and the other was white.
So Billy moved his glass as those dots started to crawl,
And saw a mite and a springtail that seemed incredibly small.
And starting to crawl under a piece of wood to hide,
Was the wonderful millipede on which they’d taken a ride.
And so from that day on Billy and Jean
Kept their eyes open wide for things to be seen.
After reading this story of things close to the ground,
See if you can find all the things to be found
That are moving about all over the ground.