Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
Simone Edgar Holmes, a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School, says she wrote this poem in response to a poem her best friend gave her as a gift. “We now have each other’s poems framed in our rooms,” she says.
Hazy Days
By Simone Edgar Holmes
Roaming idly
down the only road in sight.
Although packed paths
peek out from the underbrush,
there is no thought involved
in putting foot before foot,
again and again.
Always looking down
so not to stumble
on loose stones and roots,
but unseeing, dive straight into
the dipping branch overhead
and find oneself
when looking up to scold
the menacing tree,
surrounded by an opaque haze
that obscures all around,
leaving the illusion of solitude,
but in actuality
tripping through the maze
of pointy broken objects
meant to pierce,
cripple and maim,
and putting hands up to shield
from the crowds pushing on either side,
rocking to and fro as if
floating on a stormy sea.
In the turbine
briefly a hole in the gray sky
opens up
to reveal not a shaft of light,
highlighting the ever-present dust particles,
but a colorless lack of being
that gently rains down golden straw
as if Rumplestiltskin himself
were balanced on a cloud above,
haloed like a dark angel,
straw collecting like snow
on the suddenly frozen ground,
blanketing the shards
and pulsating throngs
as if years have passed
in a single step
or blink or breath.
And when the last straw lands
upon not the upturned and curious faces
of before
but the weakened and weathered
and defeated backs,
tears won’t be the only thing that
fall.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.