Young Writers Project is a creative, online community of teen writers and visual artists that started in Burlington in 2006. Each week, VTDigger publishes the writing and art of young Vermonters who post their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for youth, ages 13-19. To find out more, please go to youngwritersproject.org or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org; (802) 324-9538.
“If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile,” poet Mary Oliver writes in “Dogfish,” describing the floundering creature’s mouth; she has a way of twisting the unpleasant into the curious. This week’s featured writer, Rose Lord of Charlotte, finds inspiration in Oliver’s worship of Nature and her overlooked wonders — and, too, the sharp, affecting parallels that often exist between us.
Dandelion
By Rose Lord, 17, of Charlotte
Some sort of stubborn, desperate thing
kept searching for the light
and crawling ever-upward, through the dirt.
Trod upon and ragged,
with a fierce hunger.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a sidewalk,
cracked and desolate, with a single, near-dead flower
forcing its way up
against the weight of the sky.
And you know
what they say
about what doesn’t kill you.
I wanted
myself to be different; I wanted
to disappear, like the burning of morning fog; I wanted
myself to fall, and rise,
like a wave, like the sun, like the part of the morning
when the stars fall
out of the sky: a question, an answer;
I wanted
to diffuse into the world
like the light on the horizon; I wanted
to know
wherever I was, I was
okay.
Deeply.
For more than just a moment or two.
