This work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Rapunzel, If Her Voice Came With Her by Ellie Spirrett
Mother, the sky held your voice
up to my face with its knuckles
and I did what it asked me.
I pushed my head on the wind
like fingers on a bruise.
I did not cry
when my scalp tore.
I still feel it in my hair.
The hands that ripped my body from
the window like skin off a wound.
The same hands that held me and told me I was
beautiful. I was worth climbing for.
He watched you call me out into the sky.
He knew how to hold my hair so it wouldn’t let me go.
I cut my hair for him
with you still in it, choking on your own stairs.
He brought me down to a world that used
to be a scene I watched through a gap in the bricks.
I learnt I don’t need hair to be dragged
through windows. I do as I am told.
Mother, I don’t know how to breathe down here.
You only taught me how to breathe
clouds.
I know how to withstand pain
so when he holds me and tells me I
am the most beautiful thing he has ever found,
I breathe like you taught me to.
I close my eyes and imagine the world
is a scene through a gap in the bricks.
About Ellie Spirrett
Ellie Spirrett is a poet and member of Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective. She writes about disability, ableism, friendship and the loneliness epidemic. Ellie is the self advocacy coordinator at Lewisham Speaking Up, an organisation that supports people with learning disabilities to campaign for their rights.