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.
Fiona Sweeney, an eighth-grade student at Crossroads Academy, says she wrote this poem about feminism because it is “often misconstrued to be something radical and ‘anti-man.’” Fiona says, “By definition, feminism is the belief that men and women (and those who don’t identify with either gender) should all be equal from political, social, and economic standpoints. I wrote this poem in response to an encounter I had with another student who, despite my best efforts, was refusing to understand that feminism is about equality, not man hating.”
Misunderstood
By Fiona Sweeney
All alone with hellfire
Raising demons in your blood
Licking wounds of men
With misdemeanors on their tongues
Whilst I sit, not silent
With my patience running thin
I entreat you, no, I plead you
To just take a look within
Misrepresented mirrors
Slowly blinding on the walls
A word which seems to bind me
On to your resentful call
“Feminist,” not a compliment
Though really it should be
We are representing women
With our strongly growing tree
Sometimes branches mutate
And try to distort the image
Of a calm, respectful movement
Not a rude and killing sin
So with passion on my tongue
And a fire in my veins
I will support equality
To help rid us of this pain
Of under-education
And of the non-toleration
And of hurtful accusations
Of a terrorizing nation
It’s my body and my brain
So don’t tell me what to do
And when I want your opinion
I’ll make sure to come ask you
Because a yes is a yes
A no is a no
Your body is yours
From your head to your toes
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.
