About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Sylvan Williams writes about the trust a child puts in a mother, and the mother’s earnest hopes for a better future for her child. She is an eighth-grade student at U-32 Middle School.
Shard of the Sun
By Sylvan Williams
[T]he woman bent down to the rubble,
the garbage and the ruins
of a once prosperous city.
The child on her hip leaned down
to pull their fingers through the dirt,
leaning backwards from their mother’s knee,
bent over like a dancer,
long fingertips just barely grazing the ground,
fully trusting their partner, without a hint of doubt
that they won’t return them to safety.
The woman reached into the heap,
grasping something with her long fingers.
She pulled it out carefully, and held it up
to the grey sky.
“This is a piece of the sun,”
she tells the child.
“It is a blessing. A gift.
A message.”
“What does the message say?”
the child asks,
looking up with wide, humble, brown eyes.
“It says that everything will be okay,”
the woman replies, and the child believes her.
Nodding their head solemnly,
the child reaches up to grasp the shining piece of the sun.
“Will it protect us?” the child asks.
“Always,” the mother says, and she stands up,
turning away from the ruin,
heading off to the misty haze of light,
the remaining shard of the sun in the distance.