TEACHER NOTES
Winter in Australia is very variable.
Activity: Watch the weather report for mid winter and compare the weather report that night for Darwin and for Hobart.
List five reasons for the big difference in temperatures.
Activity: How do you know winter has arrived?
List five things that tell you the season has changed.
Activity: What images in the poem suggest to you that the scene depicted in the poem is set in winter?
Wired Barbs
A farmer exhales
warmed, wintry breath –
sights his twisted defence
Snowy River drifts
drift in against single-
Sunlight melts frost
on topmost wires
taut once, now – awry
Like the farmer’s frame
once tight, so straight,
today – it is maligned
Rusty, frosty memories
surface with pain –
undone by morning sun
Crops, stock – surrounded;
fenced by furnace-forged steel
now – long gone cold
Too old to play God
with beast, or crop
Too young to give in.
My feeling of Rainbow
I want to climb a rainbow,
And see how high I go,
Then slide back down the other side,
Land in the pot of gold.
I want to strum the colours,
Like a base guitar,
Feel the colours wash over me,
And take me to afar.
I want to use the rainbow,
As an artist’s palette,
Mix the colours to create,
A brightly coloured parrot.
But most of all I want to see,
A rainbow across the sky,
Giving hope of finer weather,
As in times gone by.
FROST IN OZ
I see icicles everywhere —
On my bike and on the stair.
Down on the gate and on the grass,
Our chooks are giving eggs a pass.
I see icicles hither and yon,
I see them hanging on Uncle Ron,
And on my mother’s washing too.
I reckon this year the frost is worse,
With icicles on the local hearse.
I’ve never seen this kind of dew —
What’s Australia coming to?
Fussy Rainbow-Eaters
Leaves choose mostly orange-red
then bands of blue
to violet.
Using light to make a meal
of carbohydrate’s
sweet appeal
their chloroplasts feed on the Sun.
But only parts of
light’s spectrum.
Leaves don’t use all sunshine’s beams.
It seems they rarely
eat their greens!
Celia Berrell
First published in Double Helix(October 2015)
Reproduced with permission of CSIRO
www.doublehelix.csiro.au
There are seven colours of the rainbow,
That all come out of one,
It’s white sunlight, through droplets of water,
Behind which shines the sun.
Red is for raspberry, orange for orange,
Yellow for banana, and green is for grass,
Blue is for blue sky, indigo for blackberry,
And then there is violet that sits below, last.
Together they make up the rainbow,
That arches across the sky,
Hoping the worst of the weather is over,
And that we can all try to keep dry.
Tasty fruit rainbow
Raspbemato
Carronge
Pearanana
Grapple
Fejoa smells perfumey in its blue-green skin
Aubluegineberry
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet? Not one
Sample a fruit
Vegetables aren’t some?
Aubergine is egg plant
resembles an egg only in shape
coloured indigo like blueberries
Tomato perhaps is
But all grow as fruit
My Dog
It is a strain,
My dog is lame,
At the Vet again,
He’ll have to remain.
At home waiting,
Contemplating,
Hesitating.
My heart breaking.
Then the call,
That said it all,
Back to playing ball,
Injury was small.
Happy again,
My dog, free of pain,
He can now remain,
On his own terrain.
Toni Newell
Australian Children’s Poetry 