[LAB] Poetry is heavily invested with playfulness. Drawing on the most recent critical discourse on children’s poetry, the present study aims to showcase that the significant form of play can be manifested in many ways in children’s poetry and also be traced in poetic language as playful humor and intense verbalplay. For this purpose, a cluster of poems are addressed, poems been found in poetic anthologies for children (“Overheard on a Saltmarsh”), in the street (“Bam Chi Chi La La: London, 1969”) in the playground (“I scream...”) and in single-poet collections (“Jamie Dodgers aren’t the only fruit”, “Skig the Warrior”). All poems reveal some of the essential qualities of children’s poetry and most importantly its overall playful character materialized both in linguistic and conceptual terms. The children’s poem “Come on into my tropical garden” written by the British-Caribbean poet Grace Nichols is closely analyzed as a manifestation of poetry’s playful spirit. The exuberance of its rhetoric and sound, its rhythmical feeling and the rich texture of its verses are conveyed through a well-embodied structure and form. What is more, the poem is thoroughly permeated by play as a core element both in thematics and figurative language. The poet uses and reappropriates the “garden” as a powerful metaphor for children’s poetry, placing the child at the very center of a symbolic natural landscape to celebrate nature’s delights and to exercise her insatiable appetite for play.