Year 7 Eleni Chapman is a true star! A member of the Stellatus Gifted and Talented programme, Eleni has been amazingly successful in her writing endeavours this year. Her review of the Musical “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was published in the ED! Section of Tuesday 23 November’s West Australian. Her short story ‘An Un-fur-gettable Case’ was Highly Commended in the Terror Australis Festival 2021 Children’s Short Story Competition and her poem ‘The Virus from Wuhan’ was Highly Commended in the Roland Leach Poetry Prize and awarded 2^nd Place in the Silver Quill Written Bush Poetry Competition and has placed in the Woorilla Poetry Prize. Eleni’s ambition is to become a journalist and, with accolades like this, she is surely well on her way.

Ms Gina Goddard
Co-ordinator – Gifted and Talented Programme

THE VIRUS FROM WUHAN by Eleni Chapman

It was the virus from Wuhan, it was, that struck the world aghast

A great pandemic that swept right through, the death toll unsurpassed

Sending continents into lockdown, all in a state of shock

Back into their own countries, tourists began to flock

This tiny little virus was causing nation-wide alarm

And that was just the start of it, the virus from Wuhan

 

Mark McGowan closed the borders, and we had to learn from home

Using Zoom, Seesaw and SEQTA, Teams and Google Chrome

All that the newspapers would take the trouble to report

Was the news of statewide lockdowns, and JobKeeper support

And then there were those people who said COVID was a yarn

But it was really more than that, the virus from Wuhan

 

About halfway through this troubled time, the panic buying began

Tinned foods flew from the shelves as fast as checkout guys could scan

Toilet paper? There was none! The shelves were almost empty

And so began what we all know, the hell of 2020

We all carried hand sanitizer, just like a good-luck charm

This pandemic had changed all our lives, the virus from Wuhan

 

At every place we visited, we were told to contact trace

And there seemed to be a QR code in every little space

Every single one of us wanted COVID just to end

We wanted to go out again, and see family and friends

It’s 2021 now and COVID has not been disarmed

We’ve simply had to learn to live, with the virus from Wuhan.