A short, sunny memory of digging in the sand with a wooden spade, watching each hole fill up with seawater. Simple and vivid, it works well as a warm-up rhyme before a trip to the beach.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition