Young 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 email Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org
Have you ever made the new acquaintance of someone you felt you had known for years? Whether in the context of romance or something else entirely, the experience can be… uncanny. This week’s featured poet, Zoe Bernstein of Jericho, writes about a star-crossed pair caught up in the web of fate, destined to meet and repeat each lifetime an exhilarating but turbulent relationship.
Forgotten
Zoe Bernstein, 15, Jericho
Our paths were set eons ago
by strange,
sadistic gods.
And every time we get reborn,
we meet
against the odds.
And every time we meet, we end up kissing by the water;
doesn’t matter if you’re a prince and I’m merely a potter.
Then we spend hours together
lounging in the sun,
and sometimes one of us stays over
even once the day is done.
And we kiss and talk together –
we both know that we’ve met.
But we can’t place just where or how,
for we always forget.
And we elope or marry,
whether boy or girl.
Even when life is oysters,
our love is a pure pearl.
But then we start corroding
and talking less and less.
It soon turns into silence
that neither will address.
That festers into hatred
that we won’t ever mend,
and we both silently decide
that this madness must end.
One always hurts another.
Our lives are short or long.
And we never feel remorse
because we know we weren’t wrong.
And the things above our heads,
they laugh,
as we fight to get our shot in.
They can watch the boat go down again
once we have forgotten.
