For this year’s nationwide celebration of poetry, pupils were challenged to write poems on the theme of the environment. Four of the best entries were selected to be published by our English Department and you can hear narrated versions of each poem, read by 2022 Bullen Reading Prize Winner Sophia (M), below.
CRADLE TO GRAVE
Lukas (F), Junior Winner
From the dawn of time,
Whether crafted by God’s hand or glacially evolved,
I have sustained fragile life
In my abundant breast;
No hunger, no thirst, no pestilence, and no plague,
Vita tuta erat. Life was safe.
Homo sapiens,
You repay my nurture with torture.
My asthmatic lungs are filling with carbon
To the ca-coffin-ous chime of Mankind’s beating hearts:
Factories, gasoline, ethanol
“May you wake up to your folly”,
Yet my pleas are too late.
I ogle my desolate landscape,
Arid, impoverished, parched, infertile.
The timbered giants that previously stood, now silent,
The acreage they populated camouflaged by an invading azure sea,
My neighbour’s rays scorch my feeble skin.
The fault of narcissistic Man.
Cough, cough
My fever intensifies until…
Here lies Earth,
Year of Death –
2222
SUMMER DAYS
Scarlett (I), Senior Winner
We tan in the heat
Green grass cushioning our backs
The world falls apart
BOWERBIRD
Isabella (K), Junior Winner
Dusk falls scattering
Shards of sunset directionless
while night journeys through the shrublands.
As the Bowerbird gathers his treasures
Which shine blue through the darkness of the eve.
It sings for its love.
The Bowerbird
Weaves its bower with the kindliness of a parent.
With concern, with hope…
NATURE’S BROKEN HEART
Ben (D), Senior Winner
tell me how it feels, to wake with the birds,
as they sing their siren song,
tell me how it felt, to spring across fields
with dew underfoot, in mornings gone,
to have your breath materialise before your eyes,
as you smile with childlike content,
to smell the warm cut grass, to feel the rays of sun,
kissing your skin, in summers well spent.
Now tell me how it feels, to let it slip between your fingers,
Tell me how it feels to hear the wind of a hurricanes blast,
tell me how it felt, to see the forests burn,
leaving miles of landscape sparse,
to smell the spills of oil,
to see turtles lifeless, after a battle with your parties’ remnant spoil,
to have its future in your grasp,
To have the power to fix our past,
To soothe the wounds dealt to nature’s heart,
And still not even take that chance.
