Read a poem written by America’s best young poets.
Want to know what the best youth poets in America are thinking? Literary Hub is pleased to exclusively share a poem, collaboratively written by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards’ National Student Poets, along with new data from the Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report™ that underscores the importance of libraries and open access to books for kids:
• 63% of kids get most of their books from the public, school, and classroom library.
• Not all children have a school library—and children without a school library report more trouble finding books they like. 54% of children who do not have a school library say they have trouble finding books they like compared to 46% of children who do have a school library say they have trouble finding books they like.
• 74% of kids ages 6-17 say reading fiction and nonfiction helps them understand the world, and nearly a quarter of children (22%) say that when choosing books, they look for books that make them think and feel.
Read the poem, which the authors recently performed at a congressional reception in Washington D.C., below.
*
Untitled
by Miles Hardingwood, Jacqueline Flores, Kallan McKinney, Gabriella Miranda, and Shangri-La Hou
Its shelves ivory rhyme-dusted,
lost entryways make meaningless
chapters. It was these once-wandered pages
that first lifted concrete into iamb, cliched dew
drops until they splintered, cast sludged waters
into wading pools then asked what could
be reflected. This book
where the boy first breathed a poet
is now decrepit, answered yesterday.
These covers,
Whose canvas imprinted on grey fingertips to chest.
Knowledge—whose message privies from
These pages,
Which innocent ignorance never traced.
Selfdom encountered from the fragrance of
These breakthroughs,
Where sight is restored to the acquiescent mind of a forced veil.
it is a kind of survival—how stories seed themselves
into children, & children grow themselves
into adults
We keep a thumbprint of these relics,
The tapestries, the eyelet threading
We call our anniversaries
That ferry through the smile lines
Of worn mountain faces,
Their protruding ridges for noses
Catching the dustings of one overcast story.
We inhale the alpine scent
Of book spines and fables turned anew,
Exhaling the perfume of narrative.
We record and record again
This blood-beat pulse of learning.
All of the children share
one silence—one recognition
of the sacred place where words fly
their maybes like hummingbird wings
from every page.
Right here, she points, offering wildness
without explanation. There’s a dragon, life-breathing,
watching me grow.
