[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
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, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Is it possible to absorb the rejuvenating energies of spring while still feeling the bitter chill of winter? This week, Essex poet Gabby Seguin weighs a different part of herself in each hand, studying the duality of her inner emotions. Even with the knowledge that dark times have come in the past and will again, she manages to find hope, too, in her future.
Do You Ever Feel Like a Flower in the Sun?
By Gabby Seguin, 17
[D]o you ever feel like a flower in the sun?
You’re sitting in water, your leaves soaked,
your face to the sky, and your petals stretching.
You feel it on your face like a warm kiss
and let it hit you like rain falling from a cloud.
Does it ever occur to you that there’s dust
covering your desk back at home?
Do you ever realize that the paint is chipped?
Does it bother you that life is a hole
that keeps going further and further down,
getting darker and darker until you hit the bottom?
Do you ever notice that the bottom,
that unbreakable, cold, and dark ground,
is not the end of everything?
While you may be tempted
to look down, to scratch at the bottom
like a cat scratching at the front door for a welcoming,
your life is up there waiting for you.
There’s always a rope around you,
leading you back up, keeping you steady –
and all you have to do is give it a tug,
pull yourself up, and cling to it.
As long as you’re holding on, it won’t let you fall.
When the sun hits your face and you soak it in,
while you’re sitting there at the top
waiting to jump down again and start over,
do you ever feel like a flower?