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.
Mianda Wood, a high school junior from Craftsbury, says this poem was prompted by “at least three things: sometimes in the evening or afternoon I walk to a friend’s house in Montpelier and I’m blinded by the sun almost the whole way there.” Also, two writing prompts helped spark the poem, “a sort of ‘words in a bag prompt,’ and I picked ‘blind,’ ‘west,’ and ‘turquoise,’ and another prompt to write a poem describing colors if you could ‘see’ them with other senses.” Mianda says, “I think the poem turned out pretty good for such a mashup!”
Turquoise
By Mianda Wood
When the west sun shines gold
on the Capitol dome,
I squint on my walk home.
If I were blind
and made this walk
I think I would
describe it … turquoise.
I can see
the city spilled out
before me.
Now with my eyes
gold is the color over
the mountains,
with the wind
and the sun
warming my face.
I can feel the sun called
turquoise.
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.
