[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
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, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Hannah Pandya, 18, of East Montpelier writes about a cast of characters who leave all sorts of things behind – from “a one-eyed cat called Willie” to “unwritten wedding vows.” Hannah writes that the poem was inspired by a project in a creative writing class at school. She says: “This project involved meeting with senior citizens in the local community, interviewing them about their lives, and using their stories as inspiration for our poetry. One story that I heard especially stuck with me — a very sweet woman named Rose told us her story of being in high school during World War II, and seeing the boys in her class being drafted as soon as they turned 18, before they ever had a chance to graduate. Although I could not fully understand the pain she and her female classmates must have gone through at seeing their friends, beaus and brothers off to war, I felt a connection when I imagined myself in her place. I wrote this piece to honor the boys taken away to war before they ever had a chance to begin their lives, and the girls left behind to hold down the homefront. Although the characters named are fictional, they represent thousands of real young men ripped away from their homes and families to fight the bloodiest war in human history.”
What They Left Behind
By Hannah Pandya
[G]eorge
Left “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo”
A 3.0 GPA
And his widowed mother, too
Tommy
Left his half-mastered square dance
Dreams of New York City
And a half-written postcard from France
James
Left a sweetheart named Billie
A bedroom half clean
And a one-eyed cat called Willie
Charlie
Left St. Elizabeth
Innocent games of war
And many an unspoken syllable
Jack
Left fears of lightning and thunder
His auburn curls
And a weeping baby brother
Uriah
Left a dozen lowing cows
Psalm twenty-three
And unwritten wedding vows
Teddy
Left cold root beer floats on summer days
Pacifist morals
And an unfinished Shakespeare play
They left themselves, too
Cold and buried
Unsung notes
Suspended in time
They left pieces of themselves,
Photographs and sheet music
Shepherd dogs and basset hounds
Creaky front steps and warped windows
Lines on the page
Dog ears in the books
Cold, bare granite
They left themselves, and they left me, too
Holding their shards of memory
Melting ice
Slipping between my fingers
Ghosts in the corners
They don’t sleep
And neither
Do I
