“11 Years Too Young” by Kashvi Ramani
Meet IHRAF’s 2022 Creator of Justice Youth winner, Kashvi Ramani! Read her winning poem, My Dodda in a Day, and enjoy her most recent piece, 11 Years Too Young, below.
Kashvi Ramani is currently a Junior in high school. In 2022, she was named a YoungArts Finalist in the Theater and Merit winner in Writing for Spoken Word Poetry and was the Youth Poet Laureate of Arlington County. She has won several Scholastic Writing awards for her Poetry and other categories like Personal Essay/Memoir, Dramatic Script, Novel and Short Story. Her poetry has been published in Rattle, the YoungArts Anthology, Brown Girl Magazine, Loudoun Community Magazine, Collaborative Solutions for Communities, Poetry Society of Virginia, SEEMA, American Kahani, and AsAm News. She has been a member of the Virginia Young Poets in Community and the DC Slam Youth Poetry Team and is the current vice president of the poetry club as well as an editor for the literary magazine at her high school.
Kashvi derives inspiration for her poetry from topics important to her and those she cares about. She hopes to offer 11 Years is Too Young a unique perspective with her work as a young female Indian-American and make a difference in her own small way.
Author Foreward:
"11 Years is Too Young": Over the past few decades, we have seen a sickening rise in school shootings. With guns made more available to the public, children as young as elementary school-age have been murdered in a matter of seconds. Being a teenager myself, I feel continuously unsafe in my school, knowing that the next lockdown called over the loudspeaker may not be a drill. We are tired of constantly looking over our shoulders. I wrote this poem to reflect a more recent shooting: Uvalde, where there were 21 victims. 19 of them were students 10-11 years old, just like my sister. I drafted this piece to honor the victims and empathize with their families as well as call for a stop to gun violence.
My sister first taught me how to smile in photos.
For years, toothache counted out the whites, brushed my face with untraceable discontent.
Ticked the corners of my mouth; aching cheeks; let’s see those pearly whites.
Then she stood by my side and . Ssqueezed the excess skin on my elbow. That’s when our bodies turned T.V. static, earthquake shoulders we pressed against one another as we tried to remain upright. Our laughter transported us through the frame; now our walls are elbow-deep in scrunched noses and upturned mouths.
She taught me how to heal, too.
Helped me close my eyes, and brave let the pill tip-toeing down my throat trickle with water. The burning sensation of a clogged throat washed away with the steady pulse of her hand. Half my size. Twice as strong. And when the trickle transferred to my cheeks, her lap became a tear-stained canvas. My sister made something beautiful out of the heavy, damp, and darkdarkness.
11 years old. Just like Miah Cerillo, life- cord tethered to her friends' death, red-glazestained memories painting over existing artwork normal. A ghost of ‘daddy’s little girl’, face cold; hard. Metal- like the shots that fire at the end of every period. Every exclamation- turned- statement -turned- question, because nothing is certain anymore.
How do they feel around for beauty in the dark when their limbs are weighed with metal bullets?
When they woke up that morning, to gunshots echoing sounded like clanging-crashing pots and pans. Like mommy’s eggs smeared on the floor, like a glass vase too fractured for flowers.
When they left home that morning, “I love you” rested on was a comma, followed by “see you later”.
When they got to school that morning, white walls were plastered with all-about-me’s and thank-you notes. With letters to pen pals and secret drawings pulled from desk drawers and framed. When the clock struck 11:33 AM, desks became shields, lifelines, too thin to drown out a muffled cry. Walls were suddenly exposed, now tinted, tainted, no longer pure.
“I love you” wasn’t meant to be a eulogy.
Uziyah Garcia,
Makenna Elrod,
Jose Flores,
Xavier Lopez,
Amerie Garza,
Tessy Mata,
Alexandria Rubio,
Nevaeh Bravo,
Miranda Mathis
—Their names spill over a news headline. Too many to say in one breath, one last breath they never had.
Your son could be next. Your cousin, your student, our sisters. Our lives could be rooted with cavities, cheek-aching toothache smiles returned. The steady pulse of a hand half our size overtaken by a soundless echo. How do we heal when there’s no one left to teach us how?
