[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.
While the term “special snowflake” is often now understood as a Fight Club reference or political affront, it was once, too, a term used to teach children about the beauty of their own individuality. Burlington poet Lola Rubin draws us back to that more wholesome, all-inclusive meaning this week, addressing themes of race and otherness in pondering the way all snowflakes are distinct yet equally part of a greater whole.
Different
By Lola Rubin, 12
[E]very time the wind whips ‘round,
elegant snowflakes dance to the ground.
Though each one is different and very small,
it doesn’t really matter at all.
So why do we look at just their skin,
when so much more lies within?
We see their icy, crystalline form,
but fail to notice what matters more.
They may not be the same at all,
but in the end that fact is small.
They are as different as they are alike,
but all are the same when it comes to flight.
Every time the wind whips ‘round,
elegant snowflakes dance to the ground.
Though each one is different and very small,
it doesn’t really matter at all.
So why do we look at just their skin,
when so much more lies within?
