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.
Jessica Beliveau is an eighth-grade student at Albert D. Lawton Intermediate School in Essex Junction. Jessica says she wrote “The Victim’s Memorial,” in response to events in the news. “In light of recent events like Ferguson, I was having a lot of thoughts about our society and who is victimized. In this piece, I thought about the ‘suffocating’ qualities of multiple aspects of our culture.”
The Victim’s Memorial
By Jessica Beliveau
[W]e kindle our lofty ambitions
and douse every stray hope and dream,
drinking gallons of coffee
so that we might stay awake.
When we finally fall asleep
wishes spark with potential,
ambitions abandoned,
set out with the trash.
We will catch a wink of sleep
and when we wake up
we find a way to light those ambitions again.
Yet the smoke,
the smoke,
the smoke
is stifling.
It’s getting harder to breathe.
Drowning,
suffocating,
dying.
Those hopes and dreams we once entertained,
snuffed like candles at the victim’s memorial,
their smoke is sweeter.
Who’d rather die awake than asleep?
I only wanted the sweet death,
not this choking torture for years
and years
and years, years, years.
We don’t need our angels
when our demons are on our shoulders.
The angels roam free in our dreamscapes
but this world is the devil’s realm.
No room for angels
in this reality.
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.
