By Sophie Pappas
Weston Clark,16, of Zionsville, was in for a surprise when he was selected as one of the National Student Poets.
Every year, five 15- to 18-year-olds are chosen to promote the reading, writing and appreciation of poetry during a year of service as literary ambassadors, particularly among young people.
Last Thursday Clark traveled to Washington D.C. where he and the other four National Student Poets read their original works and spent time with first lady Michelle Obama.
Obama said in her speech introducing the students that the program was created to nurture the passion and creativity of young people while sharing the “gifts and wonders” of poetry.
The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities hosts this event to honor the 2014 National Student Poets.
Other students selected include: Cameron Messinides, of Greenville, S.C., Madeleine LeCesne, of New Orleans, La., Ashley Gong, of Sandy Hook, Conn., and Julia Falkner, of Louisville, Colo.
Below is a poem that Clark wrote:
South on Main Street
By Weston Clark
(Courtesy of the National Student Poets Program)
In the forsaken lot
south of the Dairy Queen
the sticky smell of ice cream
mingles with the taste
of street dust kicked up,
and I feel myself slipping
on a layer of weathered tile.
I cannot help but think
that I have found the hiding place
of something long forgotten.
I am standing on an electrical-wire spool
that, now bare, sits lonely in the lot.
to step foreword is to fall
but stepping backwards
leads me ever onwards
to an old gas station
where a child could come
to the raspy woman at the counter
with a handful of sticky change
and a pack of Big League Chew
from the shelf near the gritty bathroom,
while outside his parents
refilled the parched tank
of their mud-spattered Ford
from crusty red pumps
sheathed in plastic nozzles.
My thoughts are like a faucet.
Too fast for me to
capture them all at once.
While the veiny old lady
still sits behind the counter
spitting wet wads of tobacco
into an unseen waste basket,
and smiles toothy
at children who look her way.
To escape the sun,
I stepped inside
where the Slim Jims
and Baby Ruths sat tiered
as if on bleachers at the park.
When I took one, the lady smiled
and said that she remembered
when she was my age.
There is a spider
in a crevice in the lot.
In shadow, it scuttles on
its web that breaths
like a sleeping beast.
How sick it must be
of the walls closing in around it,
of the invisible labyrinth of fibers
by which it earns its way.
How sick it must be of the insects
cocooned in silky coffins
whose slowly throbbing bodies
send weak exhales whispering
through the hairs on its back.
how sick it must be of the hard sunlight
beating down on the old lot
south of the dairy queen,
of the sticky smell of ice cream,
and the taste of street dust.
The footprints of children,
ghosts left to haunt the rubble
that is now its home.
How sick it must be of paradise.
