[Y]oung 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.
What would it be like to soar the evening sky among the stars? In “Electric Galaxy,” Barre writer Shyloh Wonder-Maez implores us to join her on a dreamlike journey through the heavens, observing the celestial beauty around her and pondering mankind’s relationship to Earth and the universe at large. She says the accompanying audio was recorded with the help of her stepfather on a cellphone in a makeshift closet studio, yet the words pierce through the darkness with sparkling confidence and fantasy.
Electric Galaxy
By Shyloh Wonder-Maez
[C]ity floating in the black inky sky,
I see you as I fly by.
Each light adds to the galaxy
of stories and lives.
I imagine jumping into
the darkness, forever falling up
into the night sky reflected below.
Maybe it’s an ocean with
strange creatures busy flowing
with the undertow.
I’m a space traveler, observing without
really seeing,
but I can still feel each being.
Pockets of life, shown by lights.
Teeming night, do you see me add
to your sky as you add to mine?
Awe-inspiring, spread out
like beautiful coral,
or a crack in the earth
with shining stardust showing through.
I want to reach out and dip my
fingers into the land,
touching each light.
We cannot be only a blight.
There is a peace to the chaos as you
watch from afar.
It used to be a miracle to see the world
from the sky, but
beauty tends to be lost on us after
the miracle has ended.
Sky inky black.
Floating city.
