Announcing the winners of the 2026 Teen Poetry Contest: “Found” by Jeremiah Deshane, “The Summer I Met Her” by Lily Fedonick, and “The Day My Childish Soul Starts to Die” by Izzy Vezina. The winners each receive a $25 gift card to The Norwood News Cafe sponsored by The Friends of Norwood Public Library. Enjoy these poems from our local teen talent!
Found
By Jeremiah DeShane
Once filled with question and sadness,
I am now full of happy madness.
Melanie taught me it’s ok to show individuality.
While Billie taught me it’s ok to show vulnerability.
Gaga told me to be loud and proud.
Now because of them all I feel found.
They all help me escape.
Even when my whole world starts to shake.
I fly to a place far away.
Where my body slowly begins to sway.
The Summer I Met Her
By: Lily Fedonick
The wind was blowing in our hair,
The golden sun was climbing down the hills kissing our cheeks, the
Day was slipping through our fingers faster than sand.
But it was only the beginning of our blossoming friendship.
We sat there in that same space, sharing stories that shouldn’t have mattered, but you stayed,
Your ears stayed and your words stayed, making your raw, careless words feel filling.
Your laughter lingered throughout the empty house without you having to step a foot inside.
I carry this resonance through the quiet without breaking it, letting it slowly seep into silence.
Even now, I notice it in small moments— in quiet rooms with laughters that linger too long,
In the soft drip against the sink, the faint July rain that sustains our roots.
And it brings me back to that same space where everything felt simple and enough.
It’s the way certain songs still taste like road trips and cheap snacks, and how a look across the room says more than a thousand pages.
We survived the awkward winters and growing pains, we learned to navigate into who we were supposed to be
Up until we realized we had no idea who we were. We were messy sketches of ourselves waiting for the ink to dry,
Through the borrowed clothes and the bad decisions, you were the only constant.
We didn’t need to have the answers as long as we had the same capricious questions.
We grew up, but we didn’t grow apart; we just expanded the space we share.
So let the years keep slipping through our fingers like sand, we built something that doesn’t wash away with the tide.
Now, our history is a map we carry, a language we only speak. We pick up exactly where we left off,
As if the sun never set on that first July afternoon.
The Day My Childish Soul Starts To Die
By Izzy Vezina
I had karate in the building
With my energy booming,
with all my strength and velocity,
With all of my will for heed.
My chest started chattering with clogged pain.
Pain violently padded my pretty body
And shattered me into shameful suffering,
I fell to the ground, telling all who heard.
My staff opt me out,
Knowing something is wrong.
I sobbed out the pain
So splitting the spared half and the suffering half of my child’s soul.
The pain never faded,
And got bigger,
Digging out of me
Like tentacles out of my decaying childhood heart.
I got dragged to the hag car
Who took me to the path of the hospital. I howl cry.
I was pulled into the room of doom.
I found my realization.
Reality is bending itself.
Everything is breaking apart.
The child heavens inside of me is dissolving.
My kids’ sanity is collapsing.
Everything joyful will soon be
Seized… Help me…