Souvenir

By Bonny Cassidy

Published 19 October 2023

                             This coast drifts.

Smooth its inches

and shifts; it sails, sometimes

pinched or ripped –

then clay-stuck, sodden.

There’s no way it fits

in a shell, but this little shell

settles into it:

                                                an instant,

                                        a crimp in space and time;

                                                speckled kiss.  Fading wave.

Students in Year 8 at Fitzroy High School composed poems and explored activities from the Sea Things learning resource. Teacher Briony O’Keeffe was a longtime and much-valued supporter of Red Room Poetry and this was the third time her students at Fitzroy High School enjoyed the program. Students visited the seaside at St. Kilda, composed kennings and worked on drafts of Martian poetry. They were sent a secondhand book about the sea that they transformed into poems inspired by The Humument Project.