Young Writers Project is a creative online community of teen writers, photographers and artists, which has been based in Vermont since 2006. Each week, VTDigger features the writing and art of young Vermonters who publish their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for 12- to 18-year-olds. To find out more, visit youngwritersproject.org, or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org and 802-324-9538.
Your horoscope is in: Tonight, you will make a new friend … all you have to do is look up. Well, this week’s featured poet, East Thetford-based Henley Cook, may not be using star charts to meander through the heavens in search of prescient purpose, but there are still answers, and a timelessly comforting presence, to be found in the sky above (if only the Man in the Moon would scootch over for his counterpart!).
The moon is where I’ll stay
By Henley Cook, 15, of East Thetford
When I was small,
I thought the moon followed me.
I didn’t know how,
but somehow
we were on the same team,
forming a pact to work together.
Maybe she was my friend.
Driving home on late nights,
my head pressed against
the cold glass of the car window
in search of her,
my breath fogged up the view.
Perhaps we could visit her sometime,
drive into the mountains.
Our car would have just enough traction
to suddenly lift up and fly
and sail toward the stars,
toward my new friend,
the moon.
She changed like me.
Sometimes she would be a crescent,
called a “fingernail moon,”
and other times she would be big and round.
But I was bound to the Earth,
where I stay.
We made sense as friends:
my sunny disposition with
hers, darker and more mysterious.
Opposites attract, they say.
But we could be similar, too.
Both night owls —
are you?
I whisper to the moon,
sharing my secrets,
because that is what friends do.
You wish on stars;
I wish on the moon.
The moon is quiet,
unlike you.
You whoosh and boom
like a Category 4 hurricane,
but the moon is peaceful
and nonjudgmental.
Nothing you could say
would change
my overall impression of her.
She will remain my sacred space.
The moon is my home.
She is where I belong.
The moon is where
I’ll stay.