Driftwood Hut

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

by Renée LaTulippe

The Poetry Friday Anthology for ScienceToday we’ll build a driftwood hut,
my brother and I, we two.
A high-tide haul of branches means
that we have work to do!

We stack up thirty sea-slick sticks,
and figure that it’s plenty.
But stacking sure is fun, and so
we stack an extra twenty.

The trick is lashing them. You need:
some twine, some time, a brother.
Two go up. Three fall down—
oops! Stack and lash another.

We wrap the hut with tattered tarp
and seaweed washed ashore,
then gather dune-grass, twigs, and shells
to pave our sandy floor.

Our driftwood hut is secret—thick
with salt-wind rushing through.
Just big enough to whisper in—
my brother and I, we two.

Copyright © 2013 Renée LaTulippe. From the book The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science. Pomelo Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

About This Poem

Driftwood HutI live on the coast of Tuscany, and in winter the beaches are full of driftwood and bamboo. My little boys often make bamboo teepees, and I love watching their engineering skills in action. Another beach is full of driftwood huts made by beachgoers and used for shade in the summer—or as forts and dinosaur caves, depending on how young you are at heart!

About The Author

Renee LaTulippeRenée M. LaTulippe has co-authored nine early readers and a collection of poetry titled Lizard Lou: a collection of rhymes old and new for All About Learning Press, where she is also the editor, and has poems in The Poetry Friday Anthology Middle School and Science editions. She developed and teaches the online course The Lyrical Language Lab: Punching Up Prose with Poetry and creates children’s poetry videos for her blog NoWaterRiver.com. Renée holds theater and English education degrees from Marymount Manhattan College and New York University, and taught English and theater in NYC before moving to Italy, where she lives with her husband and twin boys.

Where to Buy this Book

Buy at Amazon

7 responses to “Driftwood Hut”

  1. Neal Levin says:

    Great poem, Renee!

  2. Tina Cho says:

    Congrats, Renee, for having your poem here. It’s super cute, along with the photo!

  3. We used to get some lovely driftwood in New Zealand. What a cute poem, Renee. I love ‘a high-tide haul of branches’

  4. Beautiful poem, beautiful boys! Great addition to PoetryMinute.

  5. Mss. Cali says:

    This poem is the best I have ever read

  6. Mss. Cali says:

    This poem is the best I have ever read

  7. Andrea Ramon Eller says:

    I love this poem.

    It was written by Renee LaTulippe, an incomparable teacher of poetry (as well as a poet). I’m a former student whom she taught in her Lyrical Language Lab. In her four-month course I learned more about writing than I had anywhere else. Thank you, Renee. The only thing I didn’t like was that it ended. Still waiting for the next level!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.