[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.
As of 2018, the ash tree population in the state of Vermont was roughly 160 million – but that number may soon be sharply decreasing. First discovered in our state less than a year and a half ago, the invasive emerald ash borer (or EAB) has now been detected in five separate counties and is expected to continue spreading rapidly. This week’s East Dover poet Grace E. Arms implores us to act on this very real threat to the health of our forests, writing from the perspective of an ash tree whose essential nutrients are deprived from it with the boring of young EAB larvae.
A Plea From an Ash Tree
By Grace E. Arms, 9
[A]s a little ash tree,
I’m young and very sweet.
I just wish the emerald ash borers
wouldn’t eat me.
I dream I will live a long, happy life –
so don’t let them crawl in and destroy me,
like a wriggling knife.
They crawl under and upward
within ash bark,
squiggling through the dark,
and to get out they dig a hole,
like you’d see in a garden with moles.
The adults are a pretty emerald green,
but they will eat my flesh all clean.
I don’t believe using pesticides
will most successfully work…
but I also don’t want these beetles
to continually lurk.
They tend to eat me and my fellow trees,
though I’d be nice to them
if they were nice to me.
Since that’s not the case,
please help keep them in a contained place.
Leave your firewood in its space
so that my bark won’t one day become lace.
People should protect us trees
and fight with us as one,
so that in the end
the ash trees can overcome.
