Miss Mary Mack

Every child knows some version of this popular hand-clapping rhyme, in which Miss Mary Mack borrows 50 cents from her mother to watch an elephant jump so high over a fence that he reaches the sky and doesn’t come back until the Fourth of July.

But who has stopped to think what might happen when the ultimately gravitationally controlled elephant lands? Well, popular children’s poet Mary Ann Hoberman thought about it, and her clever adaptation of the rhyme is a marvelous extension of the nonsensical fun.