Young 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 email Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
YWP: Lost Opportunities
Photo of the Week: Emma Paris, 15, of Putney
“Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity,” once wrote American author H. Jackson Brown Jr. It’s a regrettable truth that this week’s featured poet, Eva Corbett of South Burlington, has come to understand all too well. In using a now-closed door as inspiration for her creative work today, she manages to open another one.
Lost opportunities
Eva Corbett, 13, South Burlington
I tried to fit the pieces
together, but my introverted self
ended up pushing them
further apart. I wanted to
spark something,
light something on fire,
watch it burn deep inside as
the smoke and ashes pricked
my frigid-cold arms.
I wanted to watch the fireworks
light up and burst
with prickling excitement
as my fingers laced through yours.
I turned my opportunity into water,
there but just out of reach,
slipping right through my fumbling fingers.
My heart beat so hard against my chest that
it broke,
and I let it.
I threw gasoline on it
and watched the sparks ignite.
Letting my opportunity
lose itself to the flames.
The flames are all around me,
surrounding me,
but I’m not burning.
I’m underwater,
lost in what I can’t touch.
My opportunity gone with the tide,
an idea turned to rust.