NEWBURYPORT — For Maureen Moore, one of the best parts of summer in Newburyport is Yankee Homecoming.
The 15-year-old from Newbury is one of the summer festival's biggest fans. There's so much about Homecoming that she enjoys, she's hard-pressed to pick a favorite event.
"It gets everyone in Newburyport together," Maureen says. "It's really fun."
So on Monday when her mother, Maura Moore, urged her to enter Homecoming's annual Kids Talent Showcase on the waterfront, she used her talents for poetry to pen an ode to the summer festival.
She crafted the 28-line poem an hour before the showcase began, highlighting many of the Homecoming events she has come to enjoy over the years — from the canoe tilt and antique cars at Old-Fashioned Sunday to the waterfront concerts to the fireworks spectacular and closing parade.
Not one to like the public spotlight, Maureen hesitantly took the stage in Market Landing Park on the waterfront and recited her poem, titled simply "Yankee Homecoming."
It caught festival organizers completely by surprise.
"It was just so well done," Homecoming Chairman Don Walters says. "You'd think it would have been written by a person a lot older than their teens."
Maureen, who will be a sophomore at Triton Regional High School in Byfield this fall, started writing poetry in the sixth grade at the encouragement of her teacher, Maureen Ouellette, who passed away that year. She continued her poetic pursuits in seventh grade, learning about haikus and other forms from her teacher, Melanie Babendreier.
"All my teachers really encouraged me to keep doing it," she says. "I started really liking it."
When she got to Triton High School last fall, another teacher, James Allen, and the librarian, Andrea Sargent, pushed her to write more poetry. She never really thought her poetry was very good until she entered a school poetry contest last spring and walked away with third prize.
"I think that really got her confidence up," her mother says.
Maureen writes in her journal most every night. She says it's a good way for her to express her feelings.
"I write about things in my life, things I see every day, my family," she says.
For the past couple of years, Maureen has been giving her mother poems for her birthdays and Mother's Day. This year, she offered to buy her mother a gift with the money she's earned baby-sitting.
"I told her, 'Don't you dare.' I love getting her poems," says Maura Moore, adding she and her husband, Kevin, are extremely proud of their daughter.
In addition to writing poetry, Maureen is an honor roll student and plays clarinet in the Triton band. A runner, she is a member of the Triton cross-country team and the Winner's Circle Running Club. She also coaches track for the Special Olympics and is a member of the Special Olympics Unified relay team, known as Dave's Raiders. She got involved with Special Olympics through her younger sister, Karen, who was born with Down Syndrome. She is also older sister to brother, David.
At Walters' request, Maureen will read her "Yankee Homecoming" poem during the telecast of tomorrow's Homecoming parade on the local cable access station.
"It embodies the sights, the sounds, the excitement and fun, all of what Yankee Homecoming is about," Michele Norton, Homecoming's director of publicity, says of Maureen's poem.
'Yankee Homecoming'
The busy streets
From sunrise to sunset
Only one week a year
No parking can be found
And traffic shifts gears
The entertainment downtown
All the tents set up
With tons of food in sight
Your wallet empty between the hour
And a free concert every night
Makes you feel like you have power
There's Old-Fashioned Sunday
With all the games
Seeing old friends
Forgetting their names
All the beautiful paintings
The old cars from way back when
Watching the canoe tilt over and over again
There's the 5K, 10 and the mile
And the bed race goes down in plenty of style
The flying colors that go up in lines
In the dark night
Above the pines
The loud thunder made
And then the next day
The music and floats from the parade
And don't forget the tours
Yankee Homecoming could never be a bore
— Maura Moore, 15, Newbury
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