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.
Pine Forest
By Sophia Cannizzaro,
a home-schooled eighth-grader from West Glover
This piece was started at a poetry workshop led by VT poet Leland Kinsey, at Poem City Montpelier this year.
Pine trees reach up,
Their softly rustling branches
Barely audible
Over the brass band
Floating up on the breeze.
They seem to be whispering
Amongst themselves,
Laying claim to a certain
Ray of sunshine
More noticable sounds
Are those made
As the trees
Drop
Their pinecones
Onto the ground, which is
Covered with orange needles
The blackbirds fly over my head.
As they swirl around the sky,
The scents of almost finished
Rye bread
And garlic
Float with them
The sun reaches its fingers down,
Touching the dancing grass.
It filters through the treetops
Weaker, and weaker
Until the last little bits
Touch the rooves
Of the falling-down shelters
Built for spirits past
The straight trunks create
A fence.
Tall, strong, majestic
They hold back the sky,
Which is a single stretch of blue
Only broken by a wisp of cloud
Floating between the roof of the bus
And the tops of the trees
When I stand up
I discover that the pine needles
Are stuck in my skin.
When I brush them off
They leave tiny indents
In my calves
I remember the taste
Of bread and garlic
As another bird flies,
Casting a fleeting shadow
On the bright colored bus
The pine trees
Bump one another.
As they sway,
The top hat and bicycle
Move back and forth
Held to the trunks
With old, rusty nails
How much longer will they hold
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.
