CHS student wins Young Georgia Authors competition
Calhoun City Schools announced in September that Melanie Matul’s poem “Bridges” has been selected as a state-level winner of the 20192020 Young Georgia Authors Writing
Competition.
Melanie is a rising senior at Calhoun High School.
Her teacher, Kelli
Deguire, described
Melanie as a “ball of energy and enthusiasm in everything she does. From academic team to debate to the classroom she is overpowered by a desire to know. Her writing reflects her own talents and her strong desire to combine her heritage and that learning that she seeks.”
The purpose of the Young Georgia Authors writing competition is to encourage students to develop enthusiasm for and expertise in their writing, to provide a context to celebrate their writing successes, and to recognize student achievement in arts and academics.
“We are extremely proud of Melanie for this outstanding accomplishment as she continues to strive for excellence in all she does,” said Peter Coombe, Calhoun High School principal.
Melanie’s prize-winning submission is below: everything will be the same as the stars live to die, the sunshine will shine in spite, the trees will sing in might nothing will change. bridges my mother speaks to me more in movement than in tongues
she laughs in sounds of smiling music and cries in dried rivers perhaps,
more to compensate the bridge between of what she believes me to be and of what i try to find myself to be (idk)
shaky, like the thunderous floor to a touch, a step, a dance intertwined and scared, of how easy it is to get lost on the bridge where the quetzales fly home for the season divided by myself, as i answer her with twisted words lost in the echoes of the tunnel beneath our stomping feet
to a tune i no longer remember how to sing
my mother tells the story of how i was born any time she can
she laughs in old music and blues of a country she has buried in her emptiness, as she never forgets to mention how she was lost in mentioning my second last name to the nurse mazariegos i answer in what i think is myself perhaps i am no longer myself perhaps, i no longer know how or what i find solace in an old memory of my “tia” later in the kitchen as she moves in a small limbs and forgotten dance
she teaches me how to make tortillas with fleeting movements and loud fingers
i learn slowly, surely, learning the notes of her song
as time leaves us in lovely stillness, i make and make and make
i laugh at the chaotic messiness of it all for it to create something
(i wonder if it’s a miracle i could recognize my hands through the white powder)
my culture comes as a shadow of the shame of my mystery
i try to move, to find the same life of it in a shell of a body i claim to be my own
sometimes i wonder what it’s like to live in colors of my own
one day, my father tells me about the marimba and it’s heartbeat that rings towards the sounds of his home, maybe to complete the
incomplete as i come
my language of unbalanced vowels and consonants can only take me so far across the bridge
where i inhale in tinkling staccato notes with no room for oxygen to share with the lemon trees of my father’s filled home, full of big memories and the melanin of 15 children
i inhale the sound of the marimba’s beat,
maybe to try to make music of my own
or maybe to make it my own heartbeat
i exhale from makeshift lungs made of enormous music
moving in soundless disasters made of blinding white then i stop. i sit down in reflections of puddles to find myself to only see reflections of white sun
i look out from the bridge towards blinding colors, wondering if i live in voiceless contradictions i am listening if it’s enough, i jump.
Bridges