Young Writers Project is a creative online community of teen writers, photographers and artists, which has been based in Vermont since 2006. Each week, VTDigger features the writing and art of young Vermonters who publish their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for 12- to 18-year-olds. To find out more, visit youngwritersproject.org, or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org and 802-324-9538.
Words! They flit in like flies, they fizzle out like flames; they’re fickle things. They’re like… well that’s the fog blowing in. What are they like — where have they gone, just now? This week’s featured poet, Maelyn Slavik of Burlington, mourns every escaped expression and every futile stretch toward the slippery phrases that elude, while yet exposing a natural knack.
Words slipping through my grasp
Maelyn Slavik, 13, Burlington
There are words
begging to be typed,
words
that want to pour from my soul,
words
whose only mission
is to be read,
to be transferred from my thoughts
to a beautifully blank page.
Ideas flow through my bloodstream,
carrying oxygen to my brain,
but are never put together,
never interpretable.
I stretch my veins out
hoping to capture them,
so they may let themselves be held,
but they slip through my grasp,
too thin to be analyzed,
too strong to be ignored.
Every time I put a pencil to paper,
my fingertips to my keyboard,
verses push up through the tips of my limbs
but refuse to let go,
self-destructing
until they’re yet again
fragments:
shrapnel of metaphors,
messages and meanings,
torn-up pages
of a novel bearing everything
that inspires me.
There are words,
ideas and inspirations,
that would glow so much brighter
if they pieced themselves together
and let themselves be known.