The Fridge of Lost and Found
By Bravo Child
Fridges offering fragments of forgiveness.
A cabinet holding packets of livingness lavished with emotions and sauces,
adorned with magnets and corporate endorsements.
Bottles of gorgeous importance coat our throats, as our voices sing jingles,
announcing our brand names;
"Grant, Howard and Jane".
Sprinkled with age and time
"I'm...", now hard to read on fading lines and wrinkles.
Our dreams listing things we no longer need
...or can no longer afford.
Barricading up the kitchen door,
we sit on the shelf and await our expirey date...
Out of boredom,
while we curdle,
we begin to read our ingredient label.
"What do I contain?"
All the bad points are in bold for all to see.
I skim over most of it - knowing is not going to change it.
...but maybe it will explain this pain in my gut,
these cuts and stains, memories and brain interruptions... distractions.
Eating out of inaction.
Acting out of guilt.
Guilty because I've eaten... but what was really in it anyway?
"What does this life contain?"
The ink has gone runny with the tears again
and we've forgotten how to read again,
so we just sit and eat again.
"If I am what I eat, then maybe I will only be complete once I've eaten everything?"
So we bite off what we can,
then put the rest in cans and in cold boxes in the fridge,
in the hope that it lasts long enough that we may get a taste of what it is to really live.
A Year 10 class worked on The Cabinet of Lost & Found learning resource with Australian performance poet Bravo Child. After watching Bravo perform his poems, the group set to work on exploring how graffiti could convey their writing to the school community. Teacher John Turner purchased an old fridge from eBay, and over a few weeks of class sessions the students drew text on the outside; on the inside, they filled the shelves to overflowing with eggs, vegetables and fruit, poetically labelled containers and mannequin body parts - all emblazoned with words.
The class presented the fridge 'cabinet' to the rest of Year 10 and their teachers, with some students reading their work and Bravo performing his poem, 'The Fridge of Lost and Found', written for the school.