Witness

Observations of the World

The Blind, the Liars, the Lost, and the Forgotten

by _____ '__

The boys that cannot see the truth are blind

The men, that tell the boys to go, do lie

Those who go and see the truth lose their minds

Told by the men to go to war and die 

In the battlefield it’s hard to see light

As bullets fly into the one beside 

Your thoughts do shift from ‘save yourself’ to ‘fight’

Around you the bodies of those who died

Stacked high up into the dark nighttime sky 

In the air, planes soar high and fly above

The artillery shells around you fly

All you wish for is a soft and white dove

You soon will become those who are all lost

Forgotten are they: those who paid the cost

Moderation

by ___ '__

The sun and moon, in balance they sway,

and Moderation in all things they portray.

The sun, a symbol of passion and fire,

too much and the earth will tire.

The moon, a symbol of calm and serenity,

too little and the night will be empty.

Together they dance in the sky above,

a reminder of the power of balance and love.

Like the ebb and flow of the tide,

Moderation is the key to a life that’s dignified.

So let us strive for balance each day,

like the sun and moon in their perfect way.

Smile

by Arielle Karni

My poem, Smile is about the smile my Grandfather and I shared and continue to share with his passing, even if it is in a different dimension. It's inspiration was Mrs. Godin's class, where we studied poems in which a particular word's meaning, in this case, "Smile", changed throughout the poem.

My mom told him I was the size of a blueberry

and he smiled as a grandfather for the first time.

I grew as big as a grape, then a lime, then a lemon,

an apple, an orange, a grapefruit.

He and my mom smiled together as they concocted this fruit salad that would soon turn into me.

We first met during my in-utero visit to Florida.

My mom smiled as her dad played Mozart for her belly.

He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in May, 2008

and smiled throughout a two week visit with his first grandchild.

The smiles transcended through skype, phone calls, emails, and exchanged pictures.

Upon our family’s move to New Jersey at my tender age of three, 

our in-person visits happily became more frequent.

He was a storyteller and a jokester, a well-read eternal student.

Our own personal Google, my brother and I called him. 

But most importantly to me, he was my grandfather,

who started and ended every visit smiling at me.

September 3rd, 2018.

The ring of the telephone echoed

throughout the Tel Aviv apartment,  

through the windows. 

toward the beach.

He smiled through the phone from Florida.

It was the last time we smiled together.

The kitchen scents of holidays with him,

annual “Camp Grandpa”, and

the endless games of blackjack

all ran through my head during that last call.

Tears cascaded down my cheeks as I ironically began to smile. 

I continued to smile, bittersweetly, on birthdays and momentous occasions, 

when I fervently knew he was smiling, from afar, with me.

I read something interesting, I ace a big test, or on any other thousands of instances, 

I want to talk to, visit with, and hug my Grandpa.

Instead, I settle into the comforting thought of our priceless times together, 

and my indelible memories of him,

and I smile,

knowing he is smiling with me.

What It’s Being A Teenager

By Arielle Karni

My poem," What It's Like Being A Teenager" enscapulsayes my experience during my teenage years and the hardships teenagers face. My inspiration for this poem was an assignment I had in my language arts class, to write a poem encapsulating this shaping period of time in one's life.

Adolescent.

Teenager. 

Young Adult.

All words that encapsulate the period of time considered the medium between childhood’s rainbows and ice cream and adulthood’s crushing expectations.

But are there still expectations?

A million from every person.

Studying till midnight

Which takes all of your might

Toxic friends

On which your social life and by extension happiness depends

Figuring out who you are

Which drives those who you thought would never leave far

A struggle-filled part of the life cycle

Evident since the times of the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet

A play written on how suppressing the expectations of these years really are

And how much

The candle really burns down, on both ends.

The Spider on the Dune

by ____

The spider had no care for me.

It existed on the dune; that was its life.

It was small, spindly, at first glance only a piece of dust.

You might overlook it when scanning the environment,

a shifting hill

of loose

sand.

The spider didn’t care that any of us existed.

I couldn’t tell whether it noticed the change

in the atmosphere,

in the place where it lived,

where,

by our conceptions,

it was born, raised, and will die.

We were kids,

running and playing on the dune

in the fun of some cool early summer heat,

but the spider was there,

crawling over my black,

asphalt colored backpack,

unawares.

It existed in itself.