Un-acid the rain. Tell polluters: Refrain! Help the rain forests
gain, not grow smaller. From “Prayer of the Good Green Boy” in
Sad Underwear and Other Complications By Janice Harayda
Children’s books about rainforests are too much with us. Trees
are dying for these books at an alarming rate, creating a
literary Robin Hood effect. But children’s poems about
rainforests are harder to find, perhaps because poets of
yesteryear wrote about “jungles” instead. One the few I’ve found
that would suit grades 3 and up is “Rainforest,” by the late
Australian poet and conservationist Judith Wright, which appears
in Classic Poems to Read Aloud (Kingfisher, 256 pp., $8.95,
paperback, ages 8–12), an excellent anthology compiled by James
Berry. “Rainforest” consists of 12 lines of iambic tetrameter
that celebrate the interdependence of the creatures in natural
world. Wright makes an implicit plea for biodiversity in the
poem, which begins: “The forest drips and glows with green. /
The tree frog croaks his far-off song. / His