YWP: It’s really human of you - vtdigger.org

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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. 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 [email protected].

Photo by Caitlyn Reed, 11, of Hinesburg. YWP Media Library

If John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles taught us nothing else, it reinforced the onerous adult lesson that, just as things don’t always go as planned, we don’t always get what we want – at first, at least. Cambridge poet Gaia Lenox, featured this week, straddles the line between the dreamy optimism of childhood and the often-disappointing realism of a more grown-up world.

It’s really human of you

By Gaia Lenox, 16, Cambridge 

Sixteen candles:

Close your eyes,
make a wish, 
bury it under the driveway for no one to find. 

Breathe the sky in
and out,
a naive hope 
that birthday candles will secure 
a happily ever after 

or new shoes,

whichever comes first, 

and you hope it’s the shoes. 
So when neither arrive 
on your front stoop, 

the disappointment 
shoved up your nose 
doesn’t drip down your throat and 
drown you. 

But again you will wish 
with your hands 
on every stone that gets
lodged in your shoe,

on pen caps 
and planets,

saving the scraps of paper 
from fortune cookies.

(Lucky numbers: 12, 5, 67, 23, 2, 9.)

Close your eyes,
make a wish,
bury it under the driveway for no one to find.

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YWP: It’s really human of you - vtdigger.org
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