Seniors in four sections of Mrs. Gallagher and Mrs. Powe’s Creative Writing classes competed in a Poetry Slam on Thursday, March 23. The winners were Jewl Amburgey (1st place: “Or So We…”), Sydney Onoyan (2nd place: “Now I Pronounce You ‘A Thing'”), and Ava McVey (3rd place: “Words”).

First place poet Jewl Amburgey shares the text of her original poem below:

Or So We…

For many, staring up at the stars is beautiful
It reminds them how small we are and how many possibilities exist
But for me
I panic a bit

Because we cannot fathom forever
Or the fluidity of time
Or how big the sun really is
Our brains are so small and weak

Yet we say otherwise

The human mind is an extraordinary thing
I’m not saying it’s not
On this planet the most powerful thing is a lump of grey and white matter
But that doesn’t really matter
Because we are never given an instruction manual
We have to figure it out all on our own
And if you have ever constructed swedish furniture
You know that it will never end in a positive way

It took us thousands of years to figure out how to break a rock to dig up roots
We discovered half of our most influential innovations by accident
When the physical action that takes up the most brain power is touching your finger to your thumb
You begin to realize that as a race we don’t have as much going for us as we think

But look up
And you will see us on our high horse
You will see how arrogant we are
How we feel that we are better than anything else

“We take care of this planet
We pride ourselves on choosing paper bags instead of plastic
We recycle
We are helping the planet
We are good”

Or so we say

But tell me
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody cares
Does it make a sound?
Did you hear it?…
There is your answer

We are never going to appreciate the world we live in
We taint
the ground we walk on with chemicals and shovels to find the deadliest, of our greed
We dry
The waters that cleaned us as babes to water our gardens, not for purity, but vanity
We cut
The trees that used to shelter us because now they “take up too much space”
We poison
The air that we breathe so we can live our lives comfortable and ignorant of the fact that in this day in age comfort and ignorance kills
We rot
Our earth
Because we are better…
Or so we think.

We humiliate and beat
the creatures that came before us by putting them in clothes and yelling “dance monkey dance”
We pump
the ones that would take us on amazing journeys, with steroids, to win races, and bets
We shoot
The animals that fed us for so long, just for fun and to display our savagery on the walls of our homes.

Those that hunted with us, and still love us even when we forget them, the ones that stay by our side and protect us, the ones we domesticated, and whom we call “man’s best friend”
Those are the ones whose ears we cut off,
the ones we force to fight,
and the ones we blame for our thirst for violence.

We kill
For sport
Because we are better
Or so we believe

We are all animals.
There are few things that truly differentiates us from them.
And the biggest difference between us, is why they are better than us
They live to survive
We live, to be comfortable

Everything kills, everything steals
But we do it for the wrong reasons
They kill for food, survival, and nothing is personal. They feel no hate.
But we…
We take lives for love, money, power, jealousy
Things that nobody should lose their lives for

Everything dies,
You take and you give
The circle of life requires death to continue spinning

But we
We don’t give back

We have forgotten that we come from the earth
We ate her food and breathed her air
She gave us everything and in return
We just needed to take care of her

But we didn’t

But now
Now we have droughts
We have summer in february
We have cities in asia where you need a mask to breathe
We have holes being torn in our sky
We have deforestation to prolong our wasteful existence
And something called “shark infested waters”
But wait
The water isn’t infested
They f***ing live there
We are the ones doing the infesting
We are the ones who are ruining our home
We are the ones who created war
Discrimination
Cruelty
Racism
Money
Homophobia
Sexism
Poverty
Hate
And
Evil

We destroy our home, and those who live alongside us
But we are also destroying ourselves
We are judging based on the color our skin instead of the content of our hearts
We kill others because we believe in different entities who live in the sky
We condemn our fellow man because that man isn’t his fellow
Its his boyfriend

We think we are more than animals
We think we are special creatures
But the truth is the same colors come from our veins
The same skeleton fills our heads
And that the same animals will eat
our “precious” brains
When we
go back
To
the earth