‘NW DC’ — a poem
Tightrope walker Image by iStock
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Ana-Sophia Mostashari, a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Day School in Bethesda. MD. You can find more work from our young writers here
NW DC
Contestant: Ana-Sophia Mostashari is a student at Georgetown Day School in Bethesda, MD. Image by Courtesy of Ana-Sophia Mostashari
This town stands on a tightrope.
A breeze threatens its stance.
The painted lips droop when left alone
or in a big enough crowd.
The mothers pray for their children.
And the children pray to never become their mothers.
The rich pretend to be normal.
The poor pretend to be normal.
The normal pretend to be happy.
And the happy have moved away.
Except one.
She lives by the river.
She is too naive for her years.
I can’t tell if her mind is light like her hair
or dark like her paintings.
She flounders to align two realities.
Light holds the truth,
yet shrouded in darkness
I dream.
Of California.
As if the breeze goes unnoticed there.
As if the lips are any less painted.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
