It looks like just
a ruined boat,
but what if we
could make it float?
We’d sail downriver
and out to sea,
with a yo-ho-ho,
my friends and me.
I’d be captain,
they’d be crew,
so they’d do what
I told them to.
We’d sail to China,
and then Peru,
on our own boat
on the ocean blue.
Old ship in Marlborough Sound, New Zealand. Photo by Ginette Pestana
Send me your ships, your schooners,
and my rocks and reefs will take them.
Send me some seven hundred,
and howling wrecks I will make them.
Give me stormy nights and surging tides,
give me captains who lack in skill,
and I will show you shipwrecks
that no other coastline will.
Teacher’s note: By day, the coast appears calm and safe. But Victoria’s treacherous, storm-tossed 130-kilometre Shipwreck Coast, from Cape Otway to Port Fairy, has claimed around 700 vessels.
Australian Children’s Poetry 