Young Writers Project is an independent nonprofit that engages Vermont and New Hampshire students to write, helps them improve and connects them with authentic audiences in newspapers, before live audiences and on websites, including youngwritersproject.org, vtdigger.org, vpr.net, medium.com and cowbird.com. Young Writers Project also publishes digital magazine, The Voice. YWP is supported by this newspaper and foundations, businesses and individuals who recognize the power and value of writing.
This week: General writing.
Never Could I Leave,But Always Will I Go
I could never leave this place,
where I see the blades of grass, tipped with green, shaking the dew from their stalks with the help of the wind.
But perhaps I’ve left already,
with my heart at college and my mind on exams, tests, and college applications.
I could never leave the sunrise sneaking over the trees and shining in my eyes when I try to do math in the morning at six a.m.
But I’m already sipping coffee with nineteen-year-olds, while deciding our majors.
I want to stay and be sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen forever,
never leaving the safe, sheltered comfort of home.
But September of 2018 will come around,
and I might be in the Shenandoah Valley, or in Pennsylvania, staring at De Sales.
I could never leave all of my books, because I know that I won’t have enough room in my dorm.
But that’s what the library will be for!
I could never leave the time that I have now,
because it will be taken and will fill with essays and midterms.
I will leave pieces of my heart behind when I go, for I will.
Resignation is not heavy to me, at least in this case.
But could I really leave my friends? The girls and boys that have endeared themselves to me? And, most importantly, my family?
No, I will go.
I will make new friends, fall in love, and hopefully get married.
Start a new family.
Where we’ll have many bookshelves,
And I’ll take my children outside,
and let them look at the grass
and at the sunrise.
Power of Words
My eyes drift along the page fearlessly.
The words are trapped in the pages of the book
like colorful fish swimming about in a tank,
harmless, even entertaining,
I can press my hands and my face to the glass,
following the fish with my eyes;
if they glance at me as they paddle by among the reeds,
there is an wall of glass between us.
But later, I am alone.
The story rears and hisses like a snake in my ear,
the glass is weakened by my imagination,
the snake in the glass cage smashes through.
I see visions; colorful flashes of scenes or faces of characters
lasting for a fleeting second before scampering away
like a squirrel up a tree in an ancient wood;
I wonder if I have actually seen something.
Visions repeat themselves in strange sequences when I close my eyes,
in layering contours like a terrifying landscape of scarlet hills.
I wish I could wash the plot from my memory forever,
and be cleansed.
Correction
Sophie Underwood is an eighth-grader at Hanover’s Frances C. Richmond Middle School. Her grade was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.