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.
Roland Downey, a senior at The Putney School, has been writing with Young Writers Project for five years and is a mentor of other writers on the YWP site. Roland wrote this poem during a poetry workshop at his school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Momentum
By Roland Downey
It’s about what you say when your poem is over.
But before you can finish the poem, you have to begin it.
And beginning a poem is the same as beginning a movement; difficult.
It’s an adrenaline-rushing, heart-stopping clamber over the summit of your brains
mountain of fear and denial that lets you stutter out your beginning few words.
The rest of the poem is easy, it’s just gaining the momentum that’s hard.
But if the momentum has been building for more than a century, why are we not free yet?
Should we not be pushing harder to reach a dream once dreamed?
Should we not be taking this movement towards freedom more than one step at a time?
Should we not be rushing towards equality with the same speed at which we go down the highway? Way too damn fast?
Or are we scared of the recoil, are we scared that our rocket of peace will blow up right here in our faces?
Are we scared of admitting that we don’t know where to go from here?
/NO?/
Then where is the movement?
Where is our momentum?
Where is the freedom?
Before we can reach the end of the poem, we have to begin it.
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.
