tail -n 2 poem | head -n 1

ed -s poems <<< $'$-1n'

A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.

C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.

E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.

G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.

I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.

K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.

M is for more, from which Less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.

O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.

Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting ar sic table.

S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.

U is for uniq, which is used after Sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.

W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.

Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.

Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and

sed '2q;d' <(tac infile)

tail -n2 infile | sed '2d'

sed 'x;$!d' <infile

sed -n 'x;$p' <infile

< poem tail -n 2 | head -n 1

awk 'NF { a=b ; b=$0 } END { print a }' file.txt

awk '{ a=b ; b=$0 } END { print a }' file.txt