Scholastic Writing and Art Awards || Poetry || I am the Future
The Scholastic Writing and Arts Award sparked an exigence for me to reflect the world I am inheriting. As an upcoming young adult, I am the Future. Current events continue to reveal the fragility of our world, social injustice, environmental crises, and political unrest weigh heavily on the present. My poem reflects this tension, acknowledging the weight of inherited challenges while asserting the potential for renewal. Here's to myself, my generation and the future to come. I am the Future, a new cure, a quiet seed that was planted, a pulse beneath soil that breathes the echoes of what came before. Some days I wake drowning in the echoes that were left behind, And when I see mothers weep in corners of the map, children fade in photographs, and hope bleeds away like color held to the sun, a wreckage drifts across my ribs. Fear still writes your choices for you. It scribbles over voices, presses dreams into smaller shapes, folds rights into envelopes that never open. And yet rain c...