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 email Susan Reid at [email protected].
If patience is a virtue among grown adults, surely it is one that glows even more brightly and admirably in children. This week’s featured poet, Ava Rohrbaugh of Charlotte, writes tender words of appreciation for the long-ago boy or girl who had the kindhearted foresight to plant a tree they would never themselves see the fruits of.
Apple seed
Ava Rohrbaugh, 16, Charlotte
Dear old and forgotten child,
you must have known
when you planted the apple seed
that it would not be yours to keep.
You must have known
the rings would thicken
at their own leisure
and the apples would come
proud and blushing,
but
decades from now.
You must have known
that the branches would
still be too tender
to climb when you
grew adventurous.
You must have expected this
and understood how patient
you had to be with the
sprout, then seedling, then sapling
as it melted slowly toward the sky.
There was no reward for you,
only the constant comments
of how sickly it looked.
There was no reward for you
but to watch it grow.
You must have known this
as you tucked gleaming black dirt
around the smooth bark
like a scarf.
You must have known this,
that nothing would bloom for you —
only the visions of what it would be
for me.
