When I go to sleep at night,
I dream of lots of things.
Blue spaghetti and bowls of fruit,
A four-legged man playing a flute,
A buffalo with purple wings,
A refrigerator taking flight.
That’s why I like to stay awake
And think of triple-layered cake.
(in response to Prompt #4)
I found a whale
made of stone,
sitting by the creek
all alone.
How it got there
I don’t know;
stuck on shore,
nowhere to go.
Teacher’s note: Whale Rock is one of many rock formations at Wilson’s Promontory National Park.
Our garbage man comes once a week
To empty out our bin,
He takes away everything
That Mum and Dad put in.
I wonder if he looks inside
To see what we’ve thrown out.
(All my worn out underpants
Would make him scream and shout!)
All our rotten vegies,
All our stinky cheese,
All the food that has expired,
Travels on the breeze.
No wonder he speeds off each week,
He doesn’t hang around.
With so much putrid garbage,
His wheels don’t touch the ground!
THE PLASTIC PACIFIC
How much plastic is in the sea?
Fifty-one trillion pieces!
Fifty-one trillion ways to kill
all our ocean species.
Choking, snarling, killingwhales, turtles, and fish;
unless we stop dumping toxic trash
our oceans will diminish.
OTTER SNOT
Does
an otter
have snot
or not?
Whether or not
an otter has
snot,
I know
not.
It seems to me
that I can see
fingers in the sky.
Cloudy fingers,
each one lingers,
as I’m passing by.
Have you ever seen salt
far from the sea?
Salt that’s still as salty
as salt can ever be?
It’s salt in far Lake Tyrell,
a salty lake, you see,
and tastes even saltier
than salt does from the sea.
Teacher’s note: Lake Tyrrell is a salt-encrusted depression in Victoria’s Mallee district.
A pair of pants blocks my view,
I can’t see down the street,
there’s fresh new snow upon the waist
and every icy pleat.
The lederhosen shop next door
makes leather pants like these,
and they hang a pair made of iron
to dangle in the breeze.
(In response to What’s Outside Your Window prompt #2. Teacher’s note: Lederhosen are short or knee-legth leather breeches often worn in German-speaking regions.)
Have you ever heard a kangaroo
Go ah-choo, ah-choo, ah-choo?
Have you ever seen a koala
Wearing a balaclava?
Cold kookaburras like to laugh,
But have you ever seen one wearing a scarf?
Owls make hoots
But don’t wear boots,
And as for wombats,
They don’t need hats.
So how come you and I will sneeze,
In the midst of winter’s icy freeze?
I’m on the Harry Potter train,
in the highlands bold and bleak,
racing through a Scottish glen,
where mist clings to every peak.
The soul of Scotland calls to me
whichever way I look,
from wind-rushed heather on the hill
to every stony brook.
Teacher’s note: The Jacobite steam train, used as the Hogworts Express in the Harry Potter movies, runs between Fort William and Mallaig. This 84-mile round trip is regarded as one of the world’s epic rail journeys.
Half asleep I pulled up my blind
and saw two men from Mars!
They were in the garden, watching me,
too big for any vase.
With special alien fingers
and huge galactic eyes,
no wonder my friend Philip said
they’d come down from the skies.
Australian Children’s Poetry 