Each Spring the Brentwood English Department sponsors the school-wide Fabrications poetry contest. Students are asked to submit a poem which responds to another student’s piece of visual art.

Below are the Grade winners for 2012. We’re sure that you’ll be impressed.

Grade 9: Sarah T

I mourn for the girl with the stars in her eyes
The summer breeze no longer affects her,
For bleak winter gales have made her too wise
 
I mourn for the sun that has gone from the skies
Wondering when the frost will give way to fair weather
I mourn for the girlwith the stars in her eyes
 
Beneath the dirt a frozen corpse now lies
Where once the starry-eyed girl danced upon the earth
For bleak winter gales have made her too wise
 
Surely to God that girl of diminutive size
Was shrewder than I, the world-weary connoisseur.
I mourn for the girl with the stars in her eyes
For bleak winter gales have made her too wise

Grade 10: Liam K

You who think the world is yours,
The World knows nothing of you.
You who think the world is nothing against your might,
Your will would break against its softest rocks.
 
You who think the world will suit you,
If Luck exists, she does not love the weak.
You who believe your potential is endless,
You have been pitifully misguided.
 
You feel the crumbling soil beneath your feet.
You feel the sea breathe against your skin.
You cry out to the breaking waves.
The World does not answer.
And you are solemn in your silence.
 
But you who think the world holds nothing for you,
You cannot lose all thought of hope,
For Hope alone has brought men to their glory,
For Hope alone has brought men through their pain.
 
You who think your will would break against the softest rocks,
You will temper mind and body, steel your soul.
You will build your body to its peak,
And break through any barriers you seek.
   
You who think the world is yours,
The World knows nothing of you.
You are too young to understand its struggles.
You are too weak to face its endless storms.
 
But you can change that.

Grade 11: Katie R

i hear the clock
so I ask myself
why do we measure time?
to remind us all that we are slowly dying?
to remind us all that there is time to be living?
i want to contemplate these things
but sometimes it’s hard to decide
between being the dying pessimist
or the living optimist
but while i consider the options
i hear the clock

Grade 12: Annie B

It is all mathematics as we approach the horizontal
Mathematics as in fate, as in the function that predicts
The shape of the Future, accurate down to the slope of our descent
 
Mathematics, as in the line prophesied and documented
And at the same time drawn straight into the waves
Like some transatlantic cable rusting and buried in its own obsolete mud
But still pointing the way to our watery centimeter of an endpoint
 
Mathematics as in no room to deviate, as in a shoal of coordinates
Swimming suspended in a box of graph paper, not an ocean
No more than an aquarium,
 
As in trapped under a glass-bottomed tangent
As the briny waters of fate rise at their expected rate