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.
Wild Things
Sela Morgenstein Fuerst, 13, South Burlington
Every spring, we throw ourselves
unceremoniously into the birthing world, abandon
all remnants of the cold dark snow. We are sun-drunk
and terribly deprived.
We give little shrieks of joy
when the croci appear at the edge of the woods,
much as we did when the snowflakes first began to fall, the cyclical
nature of the world giving us just enough time to forget.
We race each other out the school doors,
tumbling out onto the bright pavement in our haste
to be the first one to see the clear, blue sky.
Our jackets lie abandoned on their hooks. The sun is out;
we are once again wild things. And everyone else
in the state, it seems, has had the same thought —
the sidewalks are blooming with children
who stare awestruck at the petals sprouting in the concrete cracks,
elders sit on porches and wave hello
to every sort of creature passing by. The earth smells of gladness
and rain. The birdsong in the trees is incessant; crows seem to float
in the space between the trees and the wispy, white clouds;
the deep, sweet freshness of the new-made air
leaves us tipsy at street corners, gulping and desperate for more.
A poet
kneels in the grass in her Rollerblades, palms up to the bright, bright sky.
She knows the day is ending. She drinks in,
endlessly, the impermanence of warmth. The breeze is shifting,
bringing cooler scents to the horizon, slowing,
carrying with it always the unwanted passage of time.
But for now, it is sunny, and beautiful, and blue,
and as it is every spring,
there will be another day.
