I See A World

    Hi all! Welcome to my blog, I See a World. First and foremost, I wanted to talk about how I came up with the idea for this blog name. Every year at my (private) grade school, starting in fourth grade, all of the students would have to participate in a poetry contest. To be honest, I hated it. I hate writing, I hate speaking, I hate expressing myself through words. Especially when those words need to include alliterations, onomatopoeias, and so on and so forth. Despite this, I was still a perfectionist and was going to try my hardest to get into the book of poems. And I did. Each year. But eighth grade was different. It was fall of 2017. The Las Vegas shooting occurred that week. While I felt that writing a poem about the weather or my dog would be easy, it would also be using my privilege to my benefit and avoiding what wasn't directly affecting me. So I didn't write a poem on the weather or my dog, but rather about every political issue that could possibly come to mind. In hindsight, I barely remember writing this poem, but at the time, I felt pretty ballsy. After all, I went to a very conservative Catholic grade school. No one, at least to my knowledge, had written something like this or was going to any time soon. But I did it anyways. 

I See a World

I see a world 

A world of hate 

Will this world be my fate?

People who are LGBTQ

My love, they are just like me and you 

Identifying as man, woman, or none

Will we refuse to call our a child now our son?

Whether or not there is a man above

How will we ever learn to love?

Do we judge on the color of skin 

Or rather on what lies within?

From travel bans to a wall

Will this be when my future shall fall?

Bam! Pow! Boom!

Our hatred is the cause of our doom

More than fifty-eight deaths 

People taking their final breaths 

Will fighting forever fail the future of finding fun?

Is there a way we can ever be one?

I see a world of hate

I will not let it be my fate


    Surprisingly, the poem got past my teacher and into the book. As much as this poetic masterpiece above makes me cringe, it also makes me proud. At the time, I had just gotten Snapchat and Instagram, probably posting things that only 8th graders would find funny or interesting. This book, this poem, this chance, was the first outlet I had where my voice could be heard. And I loved it. I loved knowing that there was someone, even just one person out there in the world, who felt that my voice mattered. From that point on, I stopped worrying about how many people perceived me. I knew that what I was doing was right, even if my thoughts and ideas were not actualized or fully grown yet. 

-Sam 


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