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.
Isaac Jenemann, an eighth-grade student at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington, wrote this piece in response to the Young Writers Project prompt, Objects: Write about a relationship between two inanimate objects. Isaac’s choice of salt and pepper shakers sparked a great story about how love can develop despite obvious differences.
Salt and pepper
By Isaac Jenemann
I’m just inches away from the love of my life;
she’s filled with iodide, but also sugar and spice.
They say that opposites attract, well, that’s true,
‘cause we’re as different as a nail and a screw.
You are spectacular, I try to exalt,
for I am the pepper and she is the salt.
Your brass container’s beautiful, I try to yell.
Being inanimate’s like being in hell.
I’m just inches away from that really sweet guy,
the one who makes my stomach feel like a butterfly.
They say that opposites attract, well, that’s true,
‘cause we’re as different as conditioner and shampoo.
I say loving phrases but my words are put to a halt.
He is the pepper; I am the salt.
Your mechanics grind well, I try to deliver,
but my voice is lacking and he hears not a sliver.
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.
