[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.
Writer Gabby Seguin, 16, of Essex at first seems to set the scene for a spooky campfire tale in this week’s “Blame.” Instead, she offers us a darker, more socially responsible fantasy. Her character Diana is mired between two worlds: insatiable human greed, and the deteriorating forests that are directly affected. Although no white flag is raised or conclusion reached, her admittance of her own race’s ill will toward the natural world is perhaps the first step.
Blame
By Gabby Seguin
[S]omewhere in the woods,
on a dreary night, at the dreariest hour,
Diana stood on a stump.
Her hair was loose, pale as flour.
The pines surrounding her,
with their ominous moans,
sang to her in the dark –
terribly ominous, and far deep
yet calming tones.
“Hark!” they begin to shout.
“Cease, must it be?
We still stand, but only for this land,
and not for your false harmony!”
And there Diana stood,
unbothered by it all.
She had heard their plea,
and answered their call.
If not them, then who should fall?
“Humanity! Dreadful!
Just to speak it is a shame!
There is not us, or our mother,
Diana, to blame!
It is them, they have filthied us –
drenched us in their rotten nature!
There is nothing natural about this,
nothing good in this danger!
We have shouted and burned,
screamed and churned!
We’re unheard yet spoken,
awake and awoken –
but they smolder us,
and break us broken!
We are brothers in roots,
but enemies in fire.
If they should cut us down,
then they will do as they desire!
We cannot flee, we cannot hide,
so we learn to live above them,
and stay on their good side.
Even that is not enough,
or so it would frightfully seem,
and we are planted in our graves…
our freedom is but a dream.
They kill us for themselves,
never for us or Diana,
or the ancients of Muir Woods,
or the flowers of Viana.
We are exhausted from being
tortured and forgotten.
And our branches are sulking,
dying and infested
with human maggots; rotten.
Go on, Diana.
What could you say for them?
If they are the causes of our death,
what do you say then?”
“You and I, we are the same,
but there is no doubt,
that we are to blame.”
