Mazie Johnson received the Award of Excellence for her poem "Impossible." She is one of three students in the United States to be recognized by the National PTA in Middle School Literature category. The words of the poem are posted below. Congrats to Mazie Johnson on winning this incredible award!
Impossible
By: Mazie Johnson
It’s impossible to ignore the whispers.
It’s impossible to believe the laughter is not directed at her.
It’s impossible to not meet the gazes of dozens of stares as she walks down the hallway.
It’s impossible to not feel like a failure when that’s all her grades say she is.
It’s impossible to stay warm at night when the heat is never turned on.
It’s impossible to pretend everything is perfect at home, when the opposite is true.
It’s impossible to not care.
When the world has turned on her so many times,
It’s impossible to not turn into the image of the world.
Her innocence is gone,
Her laughter has hardened,
And her heart is stone.
The words that flow so carelessly out of her mouth now are so bitter,
They sting her tongue as she throws them about.
The path she has stumbled upon is one so dark and treacherous,
There is absolutely no way out.
She runs and runs,
However it is futile against the obstacles that lay in her path.
Every step she takes,
She stumbles as the roots that seem eerily like hands grab at her ankles,
Pulling her down,
Down,
Down.
And finally,
She doesn’t bother getting back up again.
This is her fate now.
This is her future.
There is no way out.
It’s impossible to escape.
As the darkness grows,
And the cold envelopes her,
As the monsters prowl in the shadows,
Waiting to feed on her surrendered body,
She begins to feel warm.
At first she believes it is only an illusion,
Or a false hope intended to guide her to her own demise,
For it is impossible to feel hope when surrounded by the dark.
Despite her logic,
The warmth grows immensely,
And, impossibly, she sees a glimmer of light behind her closed eyelids.
Curiosity overtakes her,
And she opens her eyes to see the source of the heat and light in the distance,
Glimmering ever so faintly up ahead.
A flicker.
A glimpse.
A chance.
A way out.
The light glows brighter, and brighter, and brighter still,
Until it is so incomprehensibly bright that it’s blinding in the darkness,
Impossible to miss.
She sits up.
Cautiously.
Guardedly.
The world had taught her long ago,
To never trust what appears too good to be true.
It couldn’t be this easy.
It was never this easy.
It was impossible.
There was no escape.
No hope.
Impossible.
Yet the girl pushed on,
Growing closer, closer, closer to the light until it began to take shape.
A book.
The light shines between the smooth covers.
Beckoning.
Hopeful.
She takes the pages between her fingers.
Not trusting.
It was impossible.
She begins reading.
Her eyes move over the words,
Stumbling along,
Slowly at first,
Then faster and faster until,
Look at that,
She’s gliding over the pages,
Soaring over the words that,
Impossibly,
Aren’t just words anymore.
It’s an invitation.
A doorway.
The crossroad to a new path which leads into a whole other world,
A whole other universe,
Where she is free.
She’s free from her grades,
She’s free from the pressure from her teachers.
She’s free from the neighborhood that stripped her of her innocence.
She’s free from her “friends” and the unspeakable things they attempted to persuade her to do.
She’s free from the arguing and the screams from her parents’ room,
While she cries herself to sleep in her small bed and cold house,
Pondering, believing, knowing that there’s no such thing as love.
She’s free from the darkness.
Impossible.
She keeps reading,
Absorbing word after word,
Each letter holding a new meaning.
Now she’s running,
Following the light,
The hope,
Down the dangerous path.
But now she can see the bumps and the roots and the rocks that try to trip her up.
She’s no longer running blind,
No longer oblivious to the obstacles hidden along the dark path.
She doesn’t know what’s happening,
She doesn’t care.
She falls a few times,
She gets a few scrapes,
But she gets back up and follows the light.
She’s running as fast as she can now,
Breathing hard and her muscles are aching from the journey,
But she continues on,
Running away from something just as much as to.
Words,
Words,
So many words.
The pages fly by,
And she’s almost there now,
Almost about to meet it.
So close,
Her fingertips barely away from the light’s touch.
So close.
It’s just within reach.
One more chapter.
One more page.
One more word.
She touches the light.
She closes the book.
Oh, but closing the book does not symbolize the end,
No, it symbolizes the beginning,
For now she has taken the first steps off of that horrible, dark, retched path.
Isn’t that impossible?
She continues reading,
And the words, words, words fill her eyes, her mind, and her heart.
She’s grasping for more and more until now she’s not only reading about the other worlds,
She’s reading about her own world.
She’s reading about chemistry and history,
And all of a sudden the F’s turn into A’s,
And now the teachers are whispering.
They whisper about that girl,
That girl that went from failing to acing,
And isn’t that impossible?
The darkness chases after her as she walks along this new path,
But the darkness is trailing behind her now.
The words keep coming.
She enters more worlds.
The characters come to life in her eyes,
And she makes new friends that mean so much more to her than any of her other “friends” did.
They teach her and guide her,
And soon enough she makes real friends.
They talk and they laugh,
And her laughter is bubbly again and people stop laughing at her, but with her,
And it’s so amazing.
She even makes one really close friend.
The sun rises and sets,
And she keeps reading,
She never stops.
The words keep coming and coming,
Until, impossibly, she’s writing.
She feverently writes and the words that she held in all these years pour out onto the pages.
She writes about different worlds,
And she writes people into existence.
Impossible.
She writes and writes
And reads and reads and reads.
Her whole soul,
Her whole being is invested in the words, words, words.
The darkness is so far behind her now.
She’s reading and reading and reading,
And now she closes the cover.
A beat.
Applause.
The impossible has become a reality.
She in pictures and she signs her name.
She changes lives through her words,
Just as her life was changed through them.
Her closest friend becomes something more,
And is it impossible that it’s love?
She doesn’t know,
But the light taught her there is hope,
There is love.
And now there’s a ring,
And a kiss and more applause,
And a baby cries,
And now,
Impossibly,
She is living the life,
She is living in the world in which she once escaped to all those years ago,
The world that the darkness and the whispers always told her would never be a reality,
That she would never have,
That it was impossible.
She goes to her bookshelf,
Stacked high with books,
And sinks to her knees to the very bottom.
She runs her fingers along the spines,
Searching.
She feels the familiar worn cover and a rush of nostalgia courses through her
As she pulls the book off the shelf and flips through the yellowed pages.
She walks over to where a child sits playing.
The child is a beautiful young girl,
A girl with an innocent smile that everyone says looks so much like her.
She gives the child the book,
Her light,
And says, no whispers,
Into the small little ear,
“This is a book.
It’s your escape.
Within, you will find your friends.
You will even find a family.
This is a book.
This is your future.
Your future is within reach.
All you have to do is be brave enough to reach for it.”
The small girl looks into her eyes.
The eyes are filled with innocence.
Intelligence.
Love.
She slowly,
Carefully,
As if realizing the gravity of the gift,
Takes her future into her own hands.
And the girl,
No longer a girl,
But a woman,
Takes her child into her arms and smiles as she hears her husband’s footsteps enter the front door.
She looks at her book.
Her light.
She smiles.
“It was all within reach
