Sick (Shel Silverstein)

Thinking of Shel Silverstein yesterday made me find a poem of his today. Today's poem is Sick. It's told in first-person. A school-aged girl makes up illness after illness, malady after malady so as to avoid school. Of course all of her ills disappear when she discovers it's Saturday.

The poem rhymes. AABB. Except for the surprise end which is XAAA. It adds a nice spice to the poem and ends it very well. It's the big splash after the dive.

Just noticed that the vast majority of the lines begin with either an "I" or a "my". Cool, that. The poem doesn't sound that monotonous. And again, only in that oddly-rhymed closer do we have any other type of pronoun - a "you" twice repeated. It's a very inward focused poem. I get a good sense of who N is from this poem. She's very creative, no?

Favorite line: "I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,/I'm sure that my left leg is broke--"