Pick up sticks, remember that

A pile of sticks all in a jumble

Touch one wrong and several tumble

That was back when we still had nimble hands

Sufficient to almost every task

And eyes to match

The object was to remove as many as you could

In any order that you would choose

As long as not one other stick was moved

You’d use two other sticks to do the lifting  

Used as levers or a tweezers

Just like so many little beavers

And if you were smart, you’d have a strategy

First you’d study carefully their lovely interplay

Then proceed to lift the topmost sticks away

And as you dug deeper into the pile

And as the complications grew

Solutions often depended on certain things you knew

To our great horror we found a use

For what we’d thought were just abstractions

Things like actions and their reactions

That’s right, physics and geometry

Fulcrums and balance points and leavers

We soon became believers

Imagine how impressive it can be

To place your sticks in a precise way

And cleanly catapult a difficult piece away

Or measure in your mind the exact proportion

Between relative distance and force applied

And move yet another entangled piece aside

It would have given our teacher so much satisfaction

Had we ever let her know

But when she actually taught us something, you could never let it show