“As much of my inspiration to write comes, this poem began to form during algebra class. My friend was describing how she believed her dog’s brain to be a yellow ball bouncing in a metal room, when I thought ‘That’s interesting; I should work that into my writing!” This led me to ponder what my peers thought about (all of whom do not write for fun), and I began to see this blankness that writers fill, to the point of overflowing, with ideas that we absorb from the world. And as most algebra classes lead to, I began to hurry up my work so that I could write down the poem that was floating around my head. I would later change it to become a bouncing red ball, because that was just much easier to picture.”
Bouncing Red Ball
by Sasha Fenton
Grade Eight, Otter Valley Union High
Sometimes
I sit and wonder
I sit in front of a blank page
I hold a pencil in my hand
And wonder.
What is it that makes us writers?
What is it that motivates us?
What is it that gives us ideas?
What is it that makes us constantly think?
Think of what we could use?
What we can gather from the world,
And put into words?
What is it that turns our minds,
From a red ball bouncing in a metal room,
Into a
Brilliant light,
A paradise of tales
A new world full of new people
A place that anyone can be anything?
What is it that makes us different?
What do others do?
Instead of searching the world
For a tale to be told?
What is it that makes them not see the characters
Pounding against the glass door of imagination
Telling you to come and play
To come and get lost in their world?
What happens in that metal room?
When we use the world to come up with new ideas?
I keep sitting here
And looking at the first hundred or so words of my story,
And completely re-writing it to be in a different voice
But I soon realize that there is nothing.
Nothing that may be as perfect as what I have already.
Life is like a story
Forever going
But having to end at some point
To have that last page
but with the story forever held within.
We all write
We write to let out what we feel inside
We write to tell the world
Of all our
Sorrows
Joys
Pains
Memories
Friends
We write
To tell the world of all that is out there
And as we sit
We cannot help but wonder
