YWP: 'Me, a poet, and a ballerina'

[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.

Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.

Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.

*Photo by Kelli Geney/YWP Media Library*

The older we get, the more time seems to speed up on us: Our days flash by in only a few short hours, every birthday comes upon us faster and faster… What if, just for a moment, we could freeze time? Charlotte-based Catie Macauley, this week’s featured poet, fantasizes about the whimsical journey she herself would take about town, basking in the weightless space between the past and the future.

Me, a poet and a ballerina

By Catie Macauley, 17, of Charlotte

Tomorrow I hope the clocks all stop,
and that as the hands slowly tick-tock their way to a halt,
the rest of the world follows their lead.
It will be like the first snow of the year
instead of the thousandth rain.
Everything will just pause,
and the Earth will feel comfortable in its silence,
at home in its magnitude.
I hope everyone freezes except me, a poet, and a ballerina.
For once, my short strides will not keep me straggling behind everyone else
as I pad through the resting world on slippered feet,
side-stepping parents waving to stationary school buses
and dodging careening bicyclists mid-signal with outstretched arms.
I’ll walk until I reach a theater where a ballerina pirouettes,
floating under the stage lights as she jumps and lands,
her pointe shoes scuffing silently on the stage.
Illuminated dust particles will amble through the air,
dancing with her awkwardly.
I’ll lean against a back door, as motionless as those who surround me.
I’ll hold the moment to my chest as I hug myself and turn away,
clumsily twirling my own way across the street to a coffee shop
where a tattooed girl behind the counter
watches her drip coffee suspended above its cup.
And everyone will be still, including the poet
who sits in the corner and gazes out a window,
only his eyes darting from the tabletop to the gray sky outside –
until they widen, and he grasps his pen,
puts it to his lips,
and brings it to the pad of paper in front of him.
The scritch-scratch of the ink on the page
will finally break the silence.