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With those sentiments, Jebrock, a Sonoma resident and student at Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Rafael, became one of three young people to net a Dam Fighter award in the national River of Words poetry contest. United States poet laureate Robert Hass initiated the children's contest two years ago to merge two concerns — literacy and environmental illiteracy.

Remarkably, of the thousands who entered the contest, another winner in the Dam Fighter category is Samantha Kannry, an eighth-grader at Brandeis Hillel's San Rafael campus. Her poem, "The Damn," tells of the harm wrought by the erection of a dam where a river once flowed freely.

"I don't want to leave but there's no water here," the 13-year-old from San Rafael writes, "no fish to eat, no plants to harvest."

Kannry, who says she deliberately spelled the word "dam" with an "n" as a play on words, says the message of the piece "is that we don't really own the earth and we can't do whatever we want to it. We're only here for a little while. We have to be nice to it."

Last, poet laureate Hass, an East Bay resident, congratulated the Brandeis students and six other California contest winners in a ceremony at San Francisco's New Main Library, where contestants' poetry and art will be on display through May 30.

At the ceremony, the winners read their works and Hass spoke about the power of imagination. He also addressed the Dam Fighters awards, instituted this year to honor entrants' sophisticated understanding of watersheds.

"There are so few times in life where children's words are celebrated with such dignity," says Susan Goldsborough, Kannry and Jebrock's English teacher. "It was just so moving. As an English teacher, it's the kind of thing one hopes will happen."

Over the course of the school year, Goldsborough has exposed her students to such poets as William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings and William Shakespeare. Students have analyzed and emulated poems' formats and worked with figurative language and image.

Some 25 Brandeis students entered the River of Words contest. That two won still has Goldsborough floating on air. "I'm not ever going to recover," she says.

Jebrock may never be the same either. Winning the contest "has really inspired me," she says. "I think one of my career choices is to be a writer."