Hi 🌕 HuntersMoon ,I found your writing on the newsfeed. Hopefully this review will find you in good spirit.


On Title/Subject
The title covers the poem completely, One too many refers to the 31th child you have under your wings. A school trip to the aquarium sets the context. And then the poem starts.


General impressions
The tone is light and it follows right till the end. You, the teacher is counting but never really worried.

What I find a great accomplishment is that you manage to have an ABAB poem but sometimes an ABAB plus ending, where the words are not a complete rhyme but reading out loud it just fits. I am referring to ‘sharks, dark, play, manta rays’ in the 4th part, and ‘fun, thirty-one’ in the 5th.

The most funny lines to me were: I gather them in one place and now comes all the fun. I count each smiling face... Hmmm. I now have thirty-one. The Hmmm is hilarious. This line is also the heart of the poem, it all boils down to this.

The poem tells a little tale and has a very distinct beginning, middle and end. It is a story in a poem, I like that a lot. It tells the story of the main character, a very honest teacher who proves that you don’t have to smother your kids to be a good teach. I liked it when he questions his own ability: A few seem unfamiliar but then I'm not astute; the most familiar one is the small kid in the suit. You sort of start commenting on your teachers paradigm in the first strophe: I find that the kids all look the same in all the classes. And : I'll just be double careful not to make a slip.


Final thoughts
All in all a great poem! Very humorous, I had to smile a lot. I am guessing you now have an adopted child in your midst. Great ending! The poem deserves to be read again and again. It’s good for kids as well as for adults. Good choice to look into it again after so many years.



Keep up the good work, enjoy writing!

Wies Blaize.