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.
Ada Case, an eighth-grader at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington, recorded this piece while attending a recent Young Writers Project workshop at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington.
Little Blue Bird
By Ada Case
[O]n the bookshelf, covered in a layer of dust, your picture lies facedown and forgotten.
I don’t regret not saying goodbye.
Or maybe I do, just a little.
Sometimes, I forget things. I forget why I can’t wear that red cashmere sweater anymore.
I forget why you left.
I forget that you didn’t care.
Maybe, I don’t remember because it’s easier. Maybe I don’t want to remember.
You never did … not the important things, like
putting your ring back on when you came home.
I looked out the back window the other day and saw a little blue bird with a broken wing.
It reminded me of you.
It reminded me of myself.
Sometimes I have trouble remembering the difference.
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.