We are hoping to make the Writing Corner a regular on-going feature where young writers can contribute their best work. We will publish the most promising pieces here on the website. We would like to see poems and perhaps pieces of prose about topics you feel strongly about and a prize will be awarded later in the year to the writer who has shown most potential. E-mail your work to: jean [at] holidayseminars [dot] co [dot] nz

The following pieces of work are from Elwyn Richardson’s Children With A Gift In Writing, Book II. The students were part of the Lincoln Heights Special Writers’ Class.

TIME By Fionna Halliday (12 years)

Days go by. Weeks have turned into months. Months, no longer a hope of the future, have turned to years. The years themselves have passed into memories. Ages come and go. Why?
Time, surreptitiously steals the future, silently in slippered feet. Slowly at first as if fearful of being seen it steals long youthful summers and endless seeming winter nights. Then as youth passes into maturity time becomes bolder, and confidently but stealthily takes away beauty and healthy vigour. Its passage can be traced in furrowed brows and stooping backs. Memories hold the last vestiges of an earlier era. It is too late. Time is the ultimate victor.

QUIET VALLEY By Jessica Macauley (10 years)

Faintly, so faintly, the first warning comes.
A rumble, so soft, so dangerously soft.
The valley is quiet, listening in terror.
Then a crack sounds, and the rumble is louder,
The birds flee, but the valley waits.
Then the rumble is a roar and the valley shivers.
And a crack, and a roll, and a splitting sky. . . . . .
And then they come, those triangles of terror,
Scratching the sky with steel-grey talons
Screeching and roaring and hunting the clouds,
Tearing a path to the silent horizon.
Smaller and smaller and softer and softer. . . . . .
The valley is quiet.

ROOSTER By Travis Lowen (10 years)

You,
Precocious strut!
Mark of measureless arrogance.
What a blow to your image,
To end your life
In a supermarket
FREEZER!

THE STORM By Sinead Harris (11 years)

I lay in bed listening to the sound of rain beating the roof. A short silence and through it travelled the sound of a kitten’s dismal meaow, then a scratch on the door. The rain started once more, thrashing the corrugated iron. It thundered, washing away Summer’s dirt from the drains. There was a splash as the first leak conquered the ceiling. On the decking outside, water gushed in streams down garden chairs. Then another mournful kitten call, frantic claws on wood. I got up and padded across the floor to open the door. My kitten bolted in.