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.
Who are you? What a question, always. One answer to be found, among a dozen, is encoded within our DNA; another in our collections of traditions and stories passed down, parent to child, or in our earliest memories; another in the spindliest branches of our family tree – as it turns out, there are many ways to define ancestry. This week’s featured poet, Astrid Longstreth of West Bolton, reflects on the “creased skin” of the past leaving its forever-imprint on the “rosy cheeks” of the present.
Ancestry
By Astrid Longstreth, 13, of West Bolton
Dedicated to my grandparents
To the ones who came before me,
my ancestry, my family tree,
from you to my father, to my mother.
A lifetime of memories
makes a choir.
Though you may have the solo,
there is also a duet,
a trio,
and on and on it goes,
hundreds of voices intertwining
to make the past into the present.
You are there
beside me,
because even when you are miles away
you are also standing next to me
with every memory I make, every action I take.
Creased skin is reflected
in the rosy cheeks of the child,
an hourglass with each grain of sand a person,
pouring into, flowing with,
the current of time,
each grain of sand, each waterdrop,
combining to make the future,
to make the children, and the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren, and forever on it goes.
But, just know, my grandmother, my grandfather,
and everyone before,
there is you in everything I do —
for you have left your fingerprints on the story that is my life.
