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 contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
In Congress, in boardrooms, the topic of climate change and the responsibility to restore our planet is often shirked even now — just a headache for our younger generations to resolve. This week’s featured poet, Ava Rohrbaugh of Charlotte, shows us what it will mean, one decade soon, to feel the physical world crumble around her, and know that she and her peers must clean up the messes they didn’t leave.
Dominoes
By Ava Rohrbaugh, 16, of Charlotte
I can see them now –
all the dominoes in the world
falling toward us.
Someone pushed them.I have no idea who,
but that doesn’t matter very much.
My mind is making up
the magnetic notes
as the dominoes fall on top of each other,
too far off to hear.
I am making up the words;
they waver like reeds as they touch the clouds.
The harmony is so gorgeous,
too close to understand.
It’s a lovely thing,
watching the dominoes fall
in white waves dotted black.
I have no idea what we will do when
they reach us,
but that doesn’t matter very much.
Because the whole world
is drowning in an ocean of dominoes,
but at least the music is exquisite.
