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.
Abigail Levy, a sophomore at The Sharon Academy, says she channeled some frustrations she felt at school into her poem, Ephemeral Acceptance: “I was driven to write Ephemeral by the feeling I had when I looked around at school, and saw attitudes of indifference plastered on people who I knew cared an awful lot about their appearances.”
Ephemeral Acceptance
By Abigail Levy
I care. I care desperately,
tearing urgently toward approval for the face I wear that day.
Deep silence.
Everyone cares;
life’s a stage for posturing, peacocks all.
Intelligent life piped into Aeropostale outfits,
the mind was bound to be abandoned.
Conversation is gossip, others
remarked upon,
whispered glances stolen in lockerside hall.
“That’s not me,” we’d say, but in the dark of the night, when
friends are talking to lovers and you sit alone, you wonder, and
you care an awful lot then.
Everything pasted on in front of a mirror,
steel foundation and mascara chains reinforce my
corset of porcelain flesh and mask of blushed bone,
ephemeral acceptance.
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.
