The Poetic Souls of Middle School

Youths Reveal Rhyme, Rhythm and a Little Rap for the Objects of Their Love

"Why me?" Alexander Faunteroy seems to be thinking after he sees his image displayed on a giant projection screen at the Literary Love Poetry Performance event in the District. (Photos By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

Serena McIntyre is barely 12, but already the Columbia Heights sixth-grader has suffered the slings and arrows of middle-school fortune. A boy did her wrong. So she wrote "The Love-Drained Blues."

I fell in love

With a so sweet boy

When I came here

I was treated like a toy.

Just before Valentine's Day, Serena was one of 10 poets honored at the second annual Literary Love Poetry Performance. Their verse offered a peek into middle-school hearts on affairs from love and death to candy and stuffed animals.

The winners of a regional competition, chosen from more than 150 entrants, read their original works a week ago at the District's National Music Center and Museum Foundation.

The contest was sponsored by Higher Achievement, a nonprofit after-school program in the District and Alexandria that helps fifth- through eighth-graders from disadvantaged communities improve their grades and apply to competitive high schools. It aims to broaden students' horizons by engaging them in such activities as poetry and debate and to provide them with academic mentoring.

At the event, the poets dressed in jewel-colored gowns, sharp ties and sophisticated black ensembles. Several granted pre-performance interviews about The Muse.

"Well, one time my class was getting in too much trouble, and my teacher said someone had to step up to the plate and be a leader," said Maria Lumbre, an eighth-grader from the District. "I was sick and tired of nobody stepping up." That feeling moved her, she said, to write a poem about Martin Luther King Jr.

The poem of Naomi Stanford, a D.C. fifth-grader, compared love to war: The apple of love is sweet/ And the apple of war is spoiled and rotten. Her teacher has a cousin who went to Iraq, she noted, but the poem was also about war at home. "I was thinking, like, about how when people are married and they love each other and they get into an argument," she said.

Some named Langston Hughes or Shakespeare as inspiration. Others were moved by inanimate objects.