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.
I Am the River
By Maddie Aho,
a fifth-grader at The Grammar School in Putney
I am the river
I bend and curve through time
I laugh at bridges unknown to me
And smile at the girl who sits upon that little bridge to the north
I see her every day
She passes like the seasons
Always growing
Always changing
She changes with me
Some days she is soaring
And some days she is fallen
When the mist covers to protect me
A light is always glowing
When she is near
I babble at my ghosts
And trickle at my past
But she who comes
Keeps me flowing
Over the mountains
Through the plains
Across the lakes and valleys
And into the never-ending sea
Click below to hear Maddie read her work.
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.
