Mother Owl's Rhymes

I ran across this wonderful poem on one of my new favorite homeschool blogs. It is from a delightful book "Mother Owl's Rhymes" (Kate Perkinson Howard ©1911). Google it and you will find the entire book online. It is full of helpful poems for learning.

Geography
By Kate Perkinson Howard
A desert is a barren land,
A dreary waste of dry, hot sand,
An oasis is a fertile spot,
Surrounded by the desert hot.
A cape is just a point of land
Into the water projecting,
An isthmus, a narrow neck of land
Two larger bodies connecting.
An island is a piece of land
With water all around it,
We use an "S" in spelling it,
Although we never sound it.
Now, I ll tell you something else
You didn t know a spell ago,
A group of islands in the sea
Is called an archipelago.
The earth has not been cut in two,
And yet we often hear,
The eastern half and western half,
Each called a hemisphere.
The western half, or continent
Is called the Occident ;
The eastern half or old world,
Is called the orient