Due this week

General Writing. Send in your best work – poems, short stories, essays. (Feel free to do it throughout the year, but this gives you a deadline.)
Deadline: Oct. 10.

To submit to Newspaper Series

  • Log in. (Click "Not a YWP member?" to create an account.)

  • Click "create content" and create an ENTRY
  • Fill out "title," "author name, school & grade" and "prompt" boxes.
  • Paste story into "body."
  • Click "Submit." You are done.
    NOTES: Your account email must be accurate; a "blog" entry must be resubmitted as an ENTRY to be considered.

Ocean

Submitted by pamcyr on October 15, 2007 - 10:09.

Ocean

The salty spray whips my face My skin is stung With the breath of the wind
Foam of the waves rests on the shore only to be flung by the wind again

The blue-green of the water Rushes up to the shore only to run back to the ocean once more Like a child who wants ice cream And runs back home for money Only to find the ice cream truck is gone

The seagulls’ rhythmic Sound rests my ears The warmth of the golden sand slides between the slits of air that spread my fingers apart

I leap in to the water Look down and see a new world Tropical fish line a sand bar Corral grows along the rocks

I get out and once again The Ocean’s waves Crashing, seagulls cawing Warm sand, soft towel It lulls me to sleep In my peaceful, deep sleep

an idea...

Submitted by emma_redden on October 21, 2007 - 14:32.

this great. i love the comarisions. it seems to me that this would be perfect as a poem. because of the capitalization it seems that was your plan originally. i think it might read really nicely...just an idea :)

UVM Mentor Feedback

Submitted by nataliap on March 30, 2008 - 13:02.

Isabel,

I agree, I think this piece would make a perfect poem and in fact, I read it imagining each place you had a capital letter to be the beginning of a new line. One of the fun things about working with poetry though is that you can have artistic license to structure the poem in any way you desire. As I sit here, freezing on a cold Vermont winter day, your poem takes me back to the joys of the summer and if I move by the window where the sun shines in, I can almost thing for a minute that the rhythm of the cars driving by is actually the rhythm of waves. Just what I need on a day like today!

To strengthen your piece I would suggest playing around with different ways of structuring it. Your use of figurative language like similes and your rich descriptions absorb the reader in your piece, don't change that! Instead trying laying out your piece with different length lines, assessing how line breaks in different places effects how your poem reads. One other minor thing - your last sentence confused me a bit. Because the sentence starts with "In" I expected there to be a bit more coming. What happens in your peaceful, deep sleep? I would either recommend changing the word "In" to "A" or continuing on with your piece to further explain that line. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for submitting,
Natalia

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