Here are the results for this year’s WMWP Writing Contest:
First Prize: “Seventeen Mean,” by Margaret Livingstone, Pioneer Valley Regional
Second Prize: “Listening to the Music of the Wood,” by Kevin Hodgson, William E. Norris Elementary
Seventeen Mean
Bitter words escape his lips, unbidden.
They spew from his mouth, unleashed.
I hate you, he stabs, cutting deeply,
slicing an earlier, cheap shot with worse.
This is how he is, lean at seventeen and mean.
He needs to take control. Maturing,
my child pulls free from me, away.
My super healing power stems
internal bleeding where my heart is rent.
This is how it is routine, now that he is seventeen and mean.
How many years since I was at seventeen, mean?
Remembering, knowing how not to act, or react,
or push back, taking the hits he needs to give,
showing powers of restraint, my mother never used.
This is how I survive each scene with seventeen and mean.
She hit back, returning stabs, often pushing first.
Two strong-willed women butting heads,
no safe space or boundaries to shove against.
I left before she could turn me out, onto the streets.
This is how it failed, she as queen and I at seventeen and mean.
Hard for me, but for him much harder.
He must sever bonds grown strong, taproot
deep, pushing the edges of the safe places in his life.
He needs his dad more. For now, I am the enemy.
This is how it is with him, keen to be seventeen and mean.
But I am not she. He can ram against me, relentlessly.
I offer safe harbor, to test, try, hatch, and fly. With patience,
I watch for his fragile emotions, eggshells strewn about.
Like an Eastern mystic, I’d rather walk on fire.
This is how it is to live between seventeen and mean.
Listening to the Music of the Wood
They all left on Sunday mornings,
dressed up in clean clothes and polished shoes;
their faces leaning against the inside windows of their parents’ cars
as I waved goodbye in my dirty jeans and beat up sneakers,
feeling not quite alone but utterly free as they disappeared down the road.
I’d take in the deepest breath of the day;
drawing in the silence of the neighborhood to consider my own thoughts
of the Infinite and the world beneath and above me.
I imagined their preacher standing up high on the pulpit,
pushing back against the sins of the world,
delivering sermons on the temptations that lay around us,
guarding his flock against the tide of bad judgments and unexpected calamity,
moving his congregation with equal parts anger and compassion
to understand that this is but a fragile peace
and that one must live with open hearts and open minds,
while my friends – so prim and proper on the outside yet full of chaos and energy on the
inside –
fidgeted in their seats with empty ears,
daydreaming about the Wood . . .
where I scampered about with abandon in the early morning Sunday light,
climbing the tallest trees to survey the world from above
and declaring this place to be my own Heavenly Kingdom
for as far as my eyes could see.
My friends sat on hard benches, balancing bibles on their knees,
absentmindedly turning page after page, scanning words
written in a language they could not quite understand –
while I opened my long, sharp, silver pocketknife
and carved a secret name into the biggest tree I could find,
pledging myself Protector of the Wood from the Great Unknown
that always seemed to be lurking just beyond view.
It was only a matter of time . . .
Those spirits later did come calling – right at my doorstep –
and it turned out that neither the preacher nor the Wood
could do much to fend off the sadness of the world,
although I often retreated to the trees for solace and comfort,
seeking out their protection as I once promised mine to them.
I’d rub my fingers along the engraved secret name
and feel the wounds I had made with my words and actions,
complicit and conflicted and completely alone.
A childhood is made up of overlapping worlds:
some defined for us; some, we make our own.
On Sunday mornings, when I’d become the center of the Universe,
the possibilities of changing this place for the better never seemed more likely than
when I was
lying down on fallen leaves,
staring up past the treetops,
pushing off into the clouds,
listening to the music of the Wood.
Keep on writing!
