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.
Lydia Moreman is a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg. She wrote the poem “Sparks” in response to a Young Writers Project prompt about a statue that begins a conversation with you as you pass by. Lydia says, “I wrote this poem because I often think about how amazing this world is, but how we take it for granted because we’ve become numb to the wonder of it.”
Sparks
By Lydia Moreman
I came across a marble statue,
heavy head grasped in frozen hands.
I placed a daisy between his fingers,
laid a kiss on his forehead, and said,
“Poor, Mr. Statue, why are you sad?”
He raised his head to meet my gaze with forlorn eyes.
“Oh, my child,” he said to me, “I do not wish
to burden your innocent mind. Go and enjoy your
childhood – we’ll meet again another time.”
“But, Mr. Statue, I do not like to see you sad.
Won’t you tell me what bothers you so?”
“My good-hearted child, I wish your ears could remain deaf
and your eye be blind to the truth of reality.
God made a perfect world;
God made the birds and the trees,
all thousand variations.
One would have been a miracle,
one would have been enough.
I’ve seen the nature of man
destroy the nature around,
taking for granted what was
lovingly created for them.
Is a sunset not breathtaking?
Has the changing of seasons grown dull?
Trees fallen,
human life thrown away.
The sky has darkened;
the sun used to shine so bright.
Now it hides behind the clouds,
ashamed of what it sees.
Every now and again,
I feel a spark,
but it is only so big,
and it gets lost among the crowd
of humans too busy to admire the miracle
of their working brain.
And that, my dear, is why I’m sad.
I used to watch the passersby,
but it was too much to bear,
and I put my head in my hands to
block it out.
Now I only hear snippets of life,
and that, too, is maddening.”
A single tear fell down his cheek,
as he closed his eyes to pray.
He laid his head into his hands
and froze once again,
a daisy clasped in his fingers.
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.
