Children's Poetry 

Many of our children can write, draw, paint, mold, dance, or dramatize what they cannot speak in a therapy session.  Such expressions can be stunningly beautiful and also serve as powerful avenues for healing.  Before we had a multi-media arts complex, with all its wonderful tools, including computers and pads for writing poetry, children jotted poems on pad and paper in their houses and at school.  Since 1980, their writings have been collected into books and provide testimony of the transformational power and beauty of poetry penned by traumatized children over the years.  Some of their books are shown below.  Just click on the image and see the poems from each book in PDF format.

Children’s poetry is also the basis of our Children’s Music Project where songwriters take the poems and, in collaboration with the student authors, compose song lyrics and melodies.  This process has led to producing four albums of songs recorded in our state-of-the-art sound studio in the Fine Arts Complex.  See The Children’s Music Project page to hear results.  Many songs have been created from children’s poetry after rephrasing a poem, or by using a part of a poem to carry its theme into a song, or by combining lines or phrases from several poems.

If you’re a songwriter, and, after reading some of the poetry or listening to some of the songs, you become interested in participating, contact our recording engineer Tony Young at studio@youth-ranch.org to find out how you might take part.