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.
Cancer
Sophia Cannizzaro
a home-schooled eighth-grader from West Glover
Everything in my brain
Connects to you
Everything I say
Reminds me of you
Everything I write
Is about you
Everything I do
Is for you
At first
You were a small part of me
But now
Now, your words have replaced mine
Your feelings have replaced mine
Your spirit has replaced mine
I am a caged bird
With no wings
To struggle with
I’m all mixed up with you
Twisted and tangled
Bent and broken
Wired to you
Like a bonzai tree
Grafted to you
Like an apple tree
I’m not sure I can get myself
Away from you
Without destroying something
Inside
I don’t know if I should treat this
Or let it run its course
I could lessen the symptoms
But it wouldn’t fix
The problem underneath
If that’s even what it is
Is loving you a problem?
Are you bad for me?
Am I going to dissolve into you?
Are you terminal?
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.
