TOP SCRIBE 2025

In keeping with the VCE Season of Excellence programs, such as Top Art or Top Film, VCAA introduced Top Scribe in 2024 to celebrate and publish the best creative pieces completed as School-assessed coursework in VCE Literature. We were delighted in Year 12 Literature when our 2024 graduate, Maya Bowditch, was selected from all of the Literature students across Victoria to be published with 19 other students as part of the first-ever Top Scribe publication! Maya is featured here at the launch of Top Scribe in June, 2025. Maya’s stunning poem, written in response to Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’, is published below.

Bridget Costelloe - English Teacher

‘Persphone and Hades’

Dawn breaks on the old pomegranate tree –

Split open and hanging ugly now.

Nose blocked and mouth forced open to receive.

Tender fruit recoils to hold place so proud.

All muscles tensed and body lain out prone,

shot through with something once so sweet and mild,

a broken woman made of but a child.

The dread silence is shattered by her groan;

Old glutted god sleeps boldened and alone.

Smooth skin grows calloused dragged on ancient tile.

A horrid warmth comes up his throat now while

her lithe young fingers met with brittle bone.

A retribution slick from blood is born

Her shuddering hand drops his slackened jaw

While darkness slips to snatch his sullen form

And loosened bricks lead her to light once more

Maya Bowditch