About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. 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, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
This piece by Emily Weatherill, a junior at The Sharon Academy, is published in this year’s Young Writers Project Anthology, which is being released Nov. 7 at YWP’s Celebration of Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. This all-day event with workshops, speakers and poetry readings is open to all students, particularly those in middle and high school. Go to youngwritersproject.org for more information and to sign up.
You Wouldn’t Know
By Emily Weatherill
[I]f I died, you wouldn’t know.
You’d
go on for
years,
wondering why I didn’t respond
to
texts
and emails.
Maybe one day you’d hear me spoken of
in the past tense
and not really register it:
“I saw her a couple years ago;
therefore, the past tense is normal.”
Maybe years later,
someone will remember me, and you’ll
say:
“I wonder what happened
to her?”
And people will stop
and stare
at you.
“You don’t know?”
someone will say, confused.
“Know what?”
you’ll ask.
And then they’ll tell you,
the truth
that you never knew.
And perhaps after
many
nights pondering how you didn’t just
know,
you decide you
don’t believe and
ask where I’m buried.
And when you find where I
sleep –
hidden among hundreds of others
marked with stone
instead of free with the wind –
under an oak,
you sit
and
talk
to the earth below you,
telling me about
all the camps I
missed,
and when the sun is long
down
and all is dark,
your voice floats in the breeze,
singing all the songs (line by line)
I never learned,
wishing I would sing along.
