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.
Gabriello Lewis, who is home-schooled in Burlington and is a rising freshman, wrote this poem in response to the Young Writers Project prompt, Perspective (To tell a story from the perspective or viewpoint of something unconventional.)
Moon Dance
By Gabriello Lewis,
a home-schooled freshman from Burlington
The moon sat and watched the universe in his eternal dance,
Bored with his purpose.
He could see every ant and every bee.
He could see the trees breathe,
But he was bored.
The moon had been there,
Orbiting the earth since he was created.
Not once had earth even talked to him,
Except to laugh at him when the humans down below finally figured out that he orbited her.
The only other time the earth talked to him or even glanced at him,
Was to rant in anger.
Then one day,
When the men from earth finally landed on his surface,
To learn his secrets,
She looked at him,
And her face wasn’t filled with rage
Or mockery.
It was love.
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.
