I woke to frost covered landscape this morning. Even though I had slept in, slept in almost an hour, it was still frosty. Several cups of hot coffee and a few slices of homemade apple bread later, the laundry was done and expecting the cold air to shock me awake I stepped out into the pleasantly brisk morning, and as I admired the lingering forsythia, the vibrant quince blossom and beyond them the greening of the woodlot, I heard a woodpecker, rapping away furiously.
These words came back to me
"Oh, the woodpecker pecked him a little round whole.
And he pecked him a hole in a telephone pole."



So I Googled it, and this is what I found.


Woodpeckers and poetry seem meant for one another. Kentucky poet and novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who wrote wonderful nature poems, composed the following gem circa 1922.
The Woodpecker

The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole
And made him a house in the telephone pole.

One day when I watched he poked out his head,
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.

When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by,

And the big, big wheels of thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.
by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
1881–1941