Mel Xiao’s poem “We Were Seven” was selected as a winner of the 2017 Moving Words Contest, an international project that transforms written works into three-minute films. A unique collaboration among artists of prose, poetry, voice acting, and animation, Moving Words intersects the individual voices of American writers with the creative vision of animators in Israel.
Mel’s poem will be voice acted and recorded by Drew University theater students. Both the audio and written pieces will then be sent to Israel where art animation students will subsequently use the written and oral pieces to complete a short film combining all three art forms. Mel’s resulting film will be shown at a festival at Drew University’s Ehinger Center in September 2018. If you wish to submit to next year’s contest, submissions are due by June 30, 2018.
We were seven
We were seven,
picking tomatoes off the ground
and rubbing them clean on our shirts
before biting down,
feeling the tart sweet bloom on our tongues
or we were thirteen,
pedaling at a million miles an hour
down roads we didn’t know yet
pretending that eyes were watching from the darkened windows
and waiting for the street magic to kick in
or we were twenty-four,
standing in a bare apartment and waiting
for the other one to leave,
tongues still tying cherry knots with our words
still uncomfortable with being comfortable
(and in those moments we were drunkards,
Atlas shrugging under the weight of a world that
even broken
was better there than not)
.
We could have been forty,
watching children grow tan and long and quiet.
We could have been fifty,
learning what it felt like to listen to silence in the place of laughter.
We could have been sixty,
breathing in the smell of rain on the pavement and the echo of a ringing phone.
I was only thirty,
the last one holding flowers before an open casket.
And once again we will be seven, picking tomatoes off the dirt before feeling the tart sweet bloom on our tongues.