Poem

Morning is good. Morning, everyone. I love you, everyone. I love each and every one of you. The United States of America. Graecie Gwyn, 9 Fallbrook, CA

I have carved truth and beauty into yellowed parchment, having created something unique, vital, simple, complex, and bottomless as a fallen flower. The jagged edge of brokenness intrudes upon my soul, and dusty fingerprints outline the soul of this poem. The unbroken stretch of time has not erased these words eclipsing the sun and moon alike. What troubles they must have faced; what creative, poetic troubles would have gnawed on that author—spirit like moss and ivy on a house! Impossible feats are possible viewed the right way, melding dark and light into lines that are like a wishing well and looking glass. These rhymes instill visions that I thought would never come again, and the rhythm beats faster than fire. For me, I find a new renewal in this poem. After years of waiting to write that masterpiece, that pièce de résistance, word after word grasps into touch, paper, and ink to reveal the tide of inspiration. Amber Zhao, 10 Brisbane, Australia

Battered plate, battered life. Plumed reed and paperbark surround that memorial, certain heirs of late afternoon and evening drifting like phantoms around that blurred steel lake, now ancient with new faces, my face lost in that ripple of glass, ripple that comes to all living things, the realization that life is not what you expect, and that glorious crown, charming everyone with heart-struck bedazzle, may tomorrow just be a faded visage of an earlier hope, withheld by a greater force, propelling everything. That tree waits, patiently, for its reincarnation as something, something, at least, for those cold words on the memorial do not signify anything about the kind woman who inhabited this place, or that gentleman, friends with birds and driftwood spears. It only quotes a name, birth and death date— but in that little punctuation mark, that tiny indentation of a dash, a whole life of sorrows, happiness, hopes and fears, all lost now on the gentle spiraled clouds, patrolling every speck-person day after day. In memorial of (insert person)—would they really want that? What if they detested that dear childish park, preferred the jazzy pace of mature metropolis life? I ask parents this; they shake their heads, clearly thinking, “The girl’s too old for her age.” They shake their heads again, but I know they have good intentions. They just don’t understand how I make magical spells, poems, out of mundane things, experiences, think such profound thoughts about life, death, eternity, and existence. But, well, that is my existence, to be honest. I do some research into their lives, with no success, and find the memorial tree again—the willow still weeping, its dainty leaves like fallen tears guarding the memorial, still highly polished, but faded with time and age. Without thinking, I cup water from the drought-sickened stream, pour it onto the memorial tree. It still looks sad. However, the next time I visit it, by an invisible change, it is happy: the falling leaves are tears of happiness, not sadness, and a delighted face uttering joyful words floats upwards like a ghost, is gone. Amber Zhao, 10 Brisbane, Australia

“The sea’s cold,” is all you write from Antarctica, “and we haven’t seen any penguins yet. Hope we do.” How to analyze that icy wilderness, with its harsh arc of grandiose majesty, luminous glaciers otherworldly in the setting sun? The Earth’s veins will be hidden deep beneath the icicle-crusted ground, my friend, and the surreal wonders of stepping onto land after many days at sea, a sensation to conquer. I remember those waterfalls of ice, pluming into the distant rays of an underwater moon. Stinging chandeliers, jellyfish, pulsed deadly, deadly under a human touch, yet beguiling, a universal gravity drawing the fingers to the stingers. Translucent lives floated and flowered in a primal ripple-ring of wild nerves, and plastic floating billowed out like hollow silk. The drift of marine snow impacts our small universe of steel pens, the kettle’s familiar whistle and scissors left unpacked from their case. We journeyed down the wild underwater cavern, that labyrinth of darkness, a metallic lake, the Southern Ocean, reflecting and dissolving ourselves as we really were. As if the pulsing of the boat was gone, and we were no longer tethered to that rope on which hung life . . . and death. It’s been a thousand years, feels like it, since I descended the staircase of ice and snow for the first time. How, then, back from our trip, has life shrunk to this bare minimum? I gnaw on my pencils; suddenly the tree in someone else’s garden flushes red, blood on branches acidly looking up to the sky, and shifting forms in textures evolve. We walked together in Antarctica, strolling from the point where universe meets universe and back, breezes whipping endlessly, our twin fingerprints glowing transparently on Antarctic, sacred land. Now you are on another expedition, and we move on different axes; you acknowledge the penguins but do not study their very form, shape, soul, like me, tiny wriggling bulbs of black and white, alighting into the ocean. At night the color palettes would spring and turn above. Your final visitation was a quick one, that ghostly gaze of departure to Antarctica already spreading its languorous translation all over your pale silken face—imagining zodiacs, moving images in a world magnified by its sheer, brutal barrenness, and an escape to endless stars wheeling, even blizzards pouring down from the polar axis’s hemisphere. Amber Zhao, 10 Brisbane, Australia

Silent glissandos of bubbles swishing around marine creatures, silhouettes beguiling the cool ocean lair of fluorescent colors that blinds with sweeping currents. I swallow the chewing gum, hard brass pennies scoring an indentation in a cupped finger. Now, in these corridors of glass, hidden worlds behind them, lunar notes trickle down liquid scales. They are faraway galaxies . . . Other music, pulse of movement, plays behind that sheet of glass. The aquarium is a living organism, fluxing and developing its body, dissolving as fish and sharks gaze at the iridescent-bright corals. In mounting dances of being, we take photos. A gentle babble, chatter amongst us. I say that the shark with its fin is leering at me. They leer and laugh at me in turn. The reflection of the glass mirrors and magnifies their separate joys. What, what must they think while the world outside drowns in rain, tinkling musically on tin roofs? Our dog came up to us, bedraggled after a long night of chasing cats, the shimmering frenzy of quarks and atoms on his straw-laden hair. And this afternoon, fog engulfs our town with its dark childless reign. We escaped to this aquarium for less water but find plenty more in the flow of aquamarine. Earth’s sap is unknown to them, prehistoric creatures alive since the dawn of time, now reduced to specks in water, gushed by man. We have lost our dreaming and our naïve believing that we could control nature—not harmony, a peaceful coexistence and thriving on this vast land— but loggers and poachers and thieves that reduce the majesty of these paperbark trees and tall blue mountains, spires reaching up, up to the clouds, and animals all thriving in seas, knowing the barrier between life and survival, now trapped with their pleading eyes and hollow, voiceless cry, grasping at a sort of eternity. Their hearts will forever be lifeless, never undergoing metamorphosis. Cameras flash, SNAP! SNAP! Visceral yet ethereal, those lights dance around the aquarium, a portal to their dimension, a celestial, bewitching world of ocean’s priestly rule. Back home, that aura of magic, that solid elemental vitality, still pulses through me. Gripping my pen, I write: Silent glissandos of bubbles swirling around marine creatures . . . Amber Zhao, 10 Brisbane, Australia

From miles away we saw it, the mountain giant’s mouth. So we mounted our metal lions on wheels and sprinted toward the mountain giant’s mouth down its long black tongue. We jumped off our metal lions and cautiously tiptoed into the mouth. Its teeth drip, drip, dripped saliva down on our heads. When we reached the esophagus, the mouth closed, and we were engulfed in darkness, with only our cracker-like lightsabers to guide us. Ethan Chen, 10 San Diego, CA