poetry

Liam Lipe-Smith, 8Rochester, NY A Day at School Liam Lipe-Smith, 8 School is out All about this nation But it’s not vacation It’s home-learning education. Home we are stuck, With much work to do From feeding the dog, To scooping some poo. Reading and writing, Language and math, It all must get done, To Avoid Mommy’s wrath. But you know what they say About work without play So we get fun in the sun, When our work is all done.

Otis Knoop, 12Brooklyn, NY Our Fate is Sealed Otis Knoop, 12 The question that has always troubled me When the end of the world is at hand, When the human race makes their last stand; What will come to be? Will darkness and woe come to plight us? Will priests pray when God has not come to right us? Like the breath of a child blows out a light Life itself will be snuffed out tonight. When the ghostly spectres roam in the roots of our sanity Will we remember our qualms? While the fate of the world slips out from our grasp A cacophony of screams That will most certainly haunt our dreams One thing that I have always thought; The world will recover nought But although the end is near, we might be healed One thing is clear; our fate is sealed. A note from the author: Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice,” influenced my poem (related to my thoughts about the pandemic) in many ways. We both wrote about the end of the world and what it would be like. Although we didn’t write about the world ending in the same way, we both summarized that it is inevitable, and will happen one way or another. One poetic device that I was inspired by him to use was symbolism–he used fire and ice to symbolize power and hatred, and I used “ghostly spectres” to symbolize our guilt. I wanted to give the poem a dark mood, to give people a sense of what might happen.