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.
If spring is the season that best reminds us to look around and welcome life’s subtle moments and tiny joys, then it is the season for all our senses to open up — for our ears to perk up to April birdsong and our eyes to revel in the flashes of color darting between the branches. Inspired by a personal favorite — Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” — this week’s featured poet, Sela Morgenstein Fuerst of South Burlington, considers the humble goldfinch in as many ways.
Thirteen ways of looking at a goldfinch
Sela Morgenstein Fuerst, 10, South Burlington
I.
Among the deathly pale hills
suffocating in their blanket of snow,
the only thing moving was the wing of the goldfinch.
II.
My mind was always pulling,
tearing itself apart to ride down three different roads,
and on each path was a goldfinch.
III.
The goldfinch soared in the autumn sky,
the winds no match for its clever eye.
IV.
Humankind and nature
are one.
Humankind and nature and the goldfinch
are one.
V.
The view from the top of the mountain
wowed me, and widened my eyes.
The goldfinch’s whistle
stole my breath away.
VI.
The trees are naked now,
trying to hide their unfashionably empty branches,
gray against the blindingly white snow.
One has no need.
It is the tree where the goldfinch rests.
VII.
Oh, great rabbis and scholars
of the villages and temples of old,
why do you speak of jeweled birds?
You have no need for ruby-adorned mechanical things,
for the goldfinch walks at your feet.
VIII.
I know of stories, of songs,
of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
Yet I know, too,
that the goldfinch is involved in what I know.
IX.
When the goldfinch
flies out of sight,
I am compelled by a sudden urge
to follow its golden wings to the ends of the Earth.
X.
When in sight
of goldfinches flying in the evening light,
even the heartless, the unfeeling,
would cry out in awe.
XI.
He rode around Vermont
on a chestnut horse, with unsightly yellow reins.
Suddenly, a fear overtook him:
He mistook the limp, little reins
for a goldfinch.
XII.
The Earth is turning,
and the river is moving.
The goldfinch will be flying.
XIII.
It was winter, again.
It had been snowing;
it was going to snow again.
The goldfinch sat
in the cedar limbs.
