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.
This poem was inspired by the prompt, Childhood, in which writers were asked to write about a piece of their childhood that they’d like to keep as they approach adulthood. The writer, Zani Lewis, is in fifth grade and is homeschooled. He lives in Burlington.
Whitestripe
By Zani Lewis,
a home-schooled fifth-grader from Burlington
Weary, bent, and gray,
I’d like to remember
Many a good and joyful day.
The person I remember,
Fast and nice and soft,
Is a mouse who used to ride
In my little wagon loft.
My mouse’s name was Whitestripe.
He had a little white belt.
His belt was shaped like an eagle.
So soft he always felt.
Sadly, Whitestripe passed away,
And was buried with “Ahem.”
It left me sad and dry and broken,
Like a flower with just a stem.
When I grow weary, bent, and gray,
I’d like to remember
Many a good and joyful day.
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.
