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.
“Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet,” an old Vietnamese proverb muses, and those of us who grew up with a brother or sister know it to ring true, in one way or another. This week’s featured poet, Dahabo Abukar of Essex, puzzles over the peculiar, varying nature of the knots — namely, silly pranks and small, thoughtful sacrifices — that bind the siblings of the family together.
Siblingship
By Dahabo Abukar, 17, of Essex
The bond of siblings doesn’t quite make sense,
because I will go half-hungry so that they can eat the other part of my sandwich.
The simmering heat of anger that a sibling can make you burn with can be quite questionable,
because, indeed, I did just put my toothpaste all over her eyebrows as a gift for using my toothpaste without asking.
It might be a little weird to betray yourself just to see a smile on their faces,
but I did throw the game again so that he could show me that smug smile of his.
One might wonder why we siblings do the things we do,
because, yes, I am lying in my bed at an awkward, sore angle so that I don’t wake him up.
The only thing that seems to make sense about siblingship is the fact that we are siblings.
