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.
Every so often, a perfect stranger will flit through your life and leave the kind of indelible impression you might expect from a beloved novel’s protagonist; they become their own story, in and of themselves, whether or not you’ve ever spoken. This week’s featured poet, Caroline Watts of Thetford Center, sings loud praise for a man leading a quiet, lonely life, doing what he can every day to bring solace and support to those in need.
The graveyard helper
By Caroline Watts, 15, of Thetford Center
The graveyard helper passes from moment to moment.
Maybe he ran away from home.
Maybe he really believed in the “small acts of kindness” lesson back in first grade.
Maybe he went through something so sad he changed.
He helps so many people, but no one knows his story.
Maybe he was a genius, a kindhearted soul, the epitome of grace.
All they know is that he talks with grieving families and puts stones in the soil.
He sees a struggling student doing her homework next to the father she buried.
He offers a helping hand with history and she later passes the test with flying colors.
He always gives half of his sandwich to the old people on the street corner.
If he can’t help them with words or kind gestures, he’ll just sit.
As they wait, all silent, gray eyes seeing into a sadder world,
he takes a chair across from them and just stays there.
But no one speaks of him and nobody knows other people know him too.
He’s a random, friendly face in a sea of memories.
Most people don’t remember him, but a handful think back on the stranger in a button-up shirt
who gave them their shopping bag when they ran out.
He tries to help people so that their faces won’t be the next ones he sees at work.
I wish I could tell him that I remember him, that his story needs to be told,
that he helped me then — and is, in his own way, helping me still.
He gives me faith in people.
I wonder where he is now.
