[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.
There is a certain magic that manifests for those calm enough to dip beneath still waters and observe the world around them, as Middlebury poet Vivian Ross might tell you. This week, she writes a highly sensorial piece describing both the beautiful alien setting and odd bodily effects of spending just a few moments alone underwater, deprived of all but touch.
Icy Silence, Water and Sight
By Vivian Ross, 13
[E]verything is icy when you dive underwater.
It leaves you no time to think,
to wonder whether you made the right choice.
It leaps into your skeleton.
You are suspended in what only you can feel.
Opening your eyes, everything is blurry, green and blue.
Your eyes sting, and are closed once again.
Blind, you propel yourself through the bubbles
that dance all over your skin.
They waltz with the goosebumps that cover you.
Water, smooth and silky, wanders and caresses you.
You hear nothing; you are alone.
You are singular, you are infinite, you are beautiful.
Any sound is muffled, stifled, silenced.
As your hair floats around,
it haloes your face, brushing your cheeks and eyelashes.
Your toes brush the rough mush of the bottom.
Stretching, you descend; kneeling, you listen.
These are the last moments that you will hear nothing.
You push off from a rock that you have found.
Your face breaks the surface of the water
that had become accustomed to stillness.
Gasping, you desperately wipe the silence out of your eyes.
