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.
The last days of summer may be upon us, but there’s still time to soak in a few rays. This week’s poet, Marlo Viglas of Sandgate, writes a pictorial ode to the season that entices us to spend a little more time with our toes in the water and our eyes to the stars while we still can.
Summer day
Marlo Viglas, 11, Sandgate
Grass between tiny toes as you play in a field of pure white dandelions,
wishing on every one you find.
Sitting by a small stream, dipping your toes in it,
feeling the shock of the clear, cold water.
Laughing on a beach of warm sand
as an ever-bluer lake shimmers like a million galaxies.
Now as the day comes to an end, the sun begins to sink in the pink sky.
Stars peek out, bright and beautiful,
and the milky moon shows its face, silhouetting you
in the field catching fireflies as your world turns dark for the night.
Laughter still echoes around the dandelions.
A sigh of relief will forever be at the river.
The warm laugh of a child still hangs by the beach.
The blue lake turns an even darker blue, freckled with the reflections of stars
as you lie in the grass just edging away to sleep.
