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 art were no longer left up to interpretation, would it have a different name altogether? Sometimes when looking down at even our own creative works, it can be impossible to find meaning in them; other times, a dozen nuanced themes and messages are there to be parsed out after the fact. This week’s featured poet, Maelyn Slavik of Burlington, studies her own still life in a lighthearted attempt to make sense of time, space, and the universe.
Overlapping theories
By Maelyn Slavik, 13, of Burlington
My eyes study my drawing
laid out simply on the white paper in front of me,
poring over the intersecting lines,
connecting corners,
and overlapping connections.
Each line is only representative,
suspecting to show so much more,
supposedly being the guide
of a fourth dimension.
These simply inked lines could be the key,
a map of something beyond our realm,
guiding us to what creates us.
They could prove that we are shadows
manipulated by the dimensions above us.
They could be time, aliens,
maybe something too big for us to fathom.
The dimension could be anything –
it could prove a thought-up theory,
or dismantle a careful idea.
My eyes study my drawing:
a model,
a tesseract,
something that could be uncannily correct
or so tremendously wrong,
both ways supplying
a river of theories and possibilities.
