Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
Erin Lashway, a junior at Mount Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, has performed her work at Young Writers Project’s Millennial Writers on Stage events, and she has been published in YWP’s anthologies and digital magazine, The Voice, where she was Writer of the Month in the inaugural issue.
Unpredictable
By Erin Lashway
Grade 11, Mount Mansfield Union High School
[T]he wind urges the tears to roll faster,
Dripping off my chin,
Slipping down my neck.
The drops cling to the silky hairs of my parka
Freezing onto the blade-like strands.
I want to scream,
Fling my arms about me
And twirl until the world blurs
And my chest hurts
And the death of consciousness
Destroys the pain.
Forget the plans,
The carefully laid-out path.
Ignore the rights and the wrongs.
Because the journey laughs
At my attempts to figure it out.
I thought I could outmaneuver it,
Anticipate everything;
I thought that I could solve the puzzle.
The problem with life, Darling,
Is it’s as unpredictable as you are.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.