YWP: 'It is a good, good body'

[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 Caitlyn Reed, 11, of Hinesburg/YWP Media Library

Some years back, a heartwarming trend began involving the widespread appearance of encouraging sticky notes left on public restroom mirrors. “Reminder: You are beautiful” and other such phrases are not uncommon to see today still, stuck there by body positivity advocates like, perhaps, this week’s featured poet. In “It Is a Good, Good Body,” Emma Paris of Putney provides us the daily dose of self-confidence every one of us needs.

It is a good, good body

By Emma Paris, 14, Putney

You are not all perfect.
There are parts of you that you don’t want to explain,
there are pieces of you that contrast with everything else.

Yet
people will call you beautiful,
and you will like it.

But
chaos is beautiful too,
and messy is beautiful,
and flames are beautiful too.

Impulse lies uneasy in your joints
but feels welcome in your heart.

Water falters at the desert
yet pours from the spout.

You do not have to burn to be shining,
you do not have to throw yourself into the flames
to become beautiful.

A deep heart is twisted around your ribs.
Blood cannot paint,
so imagine your ribs to be pearly-white.

If your heart became an ocean,
your lungs would freeze to become glass caskets
already prepared for a dying breath,
as if your body were a metaphor for mistakes.

My hair is tangled in fishing hooks.
The ocean loves flowers too,
she thinks they are
beautiful – in the way a girl would wish to have a skinnier waist
to make her feel beautiful.
But beauty is not hunger
and beauty is not pain.

You can be yourself
and beautiful
in the same meal.
In the same crop-top,
in the same school,
in the same intake of breath.

Your body is not perfect,
but it is beautiful.
Your body is not perfect,
but it is a good body.

Your body is good enough,
it is good enough,
it has always been good enough,
it is good enough for your soul.