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Have a look at the following Lyrics from Tom Waits:

Poor Little Lamb

Poor little lamb now his fleece is all cold
Wakes up in the morning alone
Poor little lamb knows what’s coming
Life is an empty cup

Poor little lamb watch your shoulder
Coyote'’s waiting out there
Nobody will get any older
If we don’t find a way out of here

So let’s go on a bummer this summer
Where we won'’t have to be afraid
The world will be on a hummer, boys
And we'’ll laugh and we'’ll drink lemonade

Now have a look at the following passage from William Kennedy's, 1983, Pulizter prize winning Ironweed.

On the wall of the abutment above the five, as one of them had pointed out, a former resident of the space has inscribed a poem:

Poor little lamb,
He wakes up in the morning,
His fleece all cold.
He knows what's coming.
Say, little lamb,
We'll go on the bummer this summer.
We'll sit in the shade
And drink lemonade,
The world'll be on the hummer.

So what's going on here? Well, the answer is quite simple. The similarity stems from the fact, that Tom Waits composed a song, based on the poem, for the soundtrack of the Hollywood film Ironweed. In doing so, we can see that in the transition from novel to film, the original poetry is rendered opaque by its transformation into music. We could read this as suppression, or displacement of the poem, by an industry unwilling to trust the sensibility of it's audience, but that may be hasty. Kennedy himself wrote the screenplay, and so may himself have transformed the poem, for reasons of narrative cohesion, economy of space or whatever. What's more interesting then, is the general idea, that poetry in novels is often not lost, but saved via transformation, when films are realised. As film is a medium, which more often than not, struggles with words, the choice to save the poem in this way, is therefore pragmatic and inspired.