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.
Hope can be our bright, shimmering star in the blackest night, just as hope can be the tiny sparks of the fireflies we capture in jars and release back into the universe before we sleep. This week’s featured poet, Natalie Lewis of Norwich, shares a handful of small, charming dreams that keep her putting one foot in front of the other — her would-be silver linings on the most quotidian of days.
Random Little Hopes
By Natalie Lewis, 15, of Norwich
There are hopes I hope
when there’s nothing else I can hope
that could solve any of my problems,
but I still need something to hope for.
I hope that there will be oyster crackers with lunch today,
so that I can eat them on their own
without the soup.
I hope that the little nook in the library
between the rack of movies and two of the bookshelves
will be empty,
so I can sit there
and reread a book I’ve read thrice before.
I hope that in English class
we will write short stories.
I won’t share mine with the class,
I never do,
but I will enjoy writing it.
I hope when my sister and her friend come home on the bus,
they don’t dawdle,
and that I don’t have too much homework,
so I can play with them
and pretend I’m 9 again.
I hope that at dinner
I can open a fresh seltzer bottle,
so I can hear the pleasing, fizzy sound
of a seltzer bottle opening.
I hope that before bed
my sister asks for an extra chapter
of the book my mom’s reading to her,
one of my old favorites,
so that I can relive it.
I hope that the next day,
when I start all over again,
I still have the energy
to hope these random little hopes.