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 cycles back to the sea
as if nothing in the world has changed,
and I wonder whether returning
is the same as healing. 

I stand inside weather you’ve made,
glaciers dissolving like unfinished thoughts,
forests collapsing where borders breathe too hard,
rivers choking and oceans rising—
Even the sky seems tired of burning.

And still, I am called the salt of the earth,
meant to wake roots,
meant to coax a seed toward itself.
But the soil trembles when I touch it,

as if it remembers a time

when growing was simple,

and every echo of past storms

still hums beneath the roots.

As papers are torn,
truths are bruised,
Grief drifts into doorways
like a language I’m still learning.
Lessons fade with the morning,
and yet I am expected to rise whole.

Technology sharpens itself beside me
cold intelligence, perfect mirrors
but only living hands
can unmake what living hands have done.

I am the Future,
but some nights I feel barely formed,
a promise whispered too early.

And if I reach for power,
do not mistake it for anger,
I know you once stood in this same first light,
hoping the world would bloom
despite its darkness.

So let this vow be carved softly,
a seed’s oath to its own becoming:

I am the Future,
the new cure,
salt in the earth,
pressing roots beneath,
rebirthing worth.