[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.
Hazel Civalier, 15, of Burlington says she wrote this poem and took this photo after being inspired in art class. “I had the Renaissance in my head from art class, and when I saw the sky I literally ran outside (in my socks) to take a picture of it.”
Clouds on fire
By Hazel Civalier
[I] always thought those smoky skies in Renaissance paintings
were an imagined phenomenon,
to give the image a mystical atmosphere.
Or a product of several hundreds of years’
worth of decay,
of still-developing paint and plaster.
Tonight the sky is like this,
a smoky orange-red-peach
not bright or dull,
not muted, exactly,
but different.
An off color.
like off-white
or seaweed green
(yes, that is a color).
There’s a touch of brown
or gray in these colors;
they’re not pure,
unlike bright white
or emerald green.
But what I can’t tell,
is if these are the sunsets of heaven
or the fires of hell.
