Teen Experience Through Poetry

“The Teen Experience Through Poetry” is a recurring column that focuses on various aspects of teenage life. This column has various student-written poems featuring differing themes in each issue. “The Teen Experience Through Poetry” is a column giving the power and the voices back to the students. This issue's topic is conversations with self, the difficult and taxing conversations we all must have with ourselves in order to be better people.

Through Film I Found Myself by Ororo Taylor

Through film I found myself,

I watched as my feet left imprinted in the ground and I sand down my self-esteem to make room for your ego,

Taking away a home, bed, and clothing your ego left me nothing but my clothes,

Showers in the dark, your confidence is already shaken so you beg for love,

Prayers fly up to Zion like airplanes, and you wait for your prayers to be answered,

You’ll die there,

Can’t nobody save the world but you, I watched as the world around me became dust and the skyscrapers became twins to ants,

When I hungered, my ego ate a feast in front of me,

But through film I found myself,

I am a movie, a bad script on the edge of nothing I cried for praise and received little to none,

Begging for safety, love, security or respect

I found myself through film because only then will I always have a happy ending.

Portrait by Ororo Taylor

The girls in the paintings mirror no images but their own,

Their skin isn’t brown enough to be like mine and their faces are too pretty,

They sit against an eggshell wall as they are admired, a feat I’ve never seemed to conquer,

I sometimes envy the Portrait

To be a muse of anything other than pain is a prayer i pray nightly,

I sometimes wish I was a portrait, no mistakes made, no feat too large to conquer,

I sometimes wish I was a portrait because if I was, then I’d know I was beautiful

Your field of Roses by Ororo Taylor

I’ve never been seen…

I’m in a glass case behind velvet rope in a world

I’ve never been seen, only viewed, through the eyes of beauty…

Told to smile and love, you see me as a girl who’s not yet a woman and a person who will never be one

My glass is smudged with fingerprints and acne so I don’t allow flash photography

sometimes I sit on the ground and watch the other exhibits be seen by your eyes,

I envy them

The powers of beauty defy the elements like a volcano erupting in a field of flowers

Only you are the field of flowers and I am the volcano, no one sits around looking at the volcano, the volcano is viewed

You are beautiful and talented and perfect and I’m fat, lanky and acne-prone

People see you and jump while people see me and burst into tears

Sometimes I sit up straight and brush my hair hoping to be seen

But the power to be seen is not held by you but by me.

I am a volcano and you will see me or I’ll erupt and mess all this up you will not lessen the severity of my voice or the voices of the other thousands of voices you want to,

You won’t tell me to shut up or to sit down because I won’t

Instead, I’ll erupt, as a matter of a fact I’ll erupt on your pretty roses

Just so you know that since you’re pretty and privileged and tall and talented that doesn’t mean that I’m any less than you

I defy the laws of gravity, you follow laws while I create them, you say yes sir, while I negate them, you fall in suit while I debate them

And I will be seen, I will dance to the beat of the earth’s music and make a song don’t compare my volcano to your field of roses

what is beauty by naveen rimah

beauty is in the eye of the beholder but what is it to behold?

how can we fathom such a unexplainable concept?

every time someone tries to explain it, that is their definition, and will never be correct

we try to explain it as a feeling, this “beauty”

the feeling of happiness

“you know when you see something you think looks nice”

what IS nice?

our definition of beauty is forever changing

does yours include me?

thats all i ask

i know, i know, i see beauty differently

my version of beauty is picking up tiny rocks on the sidewalk

and staring up at the moon until i’m dizzy

i can find beauty in the universe

in the world around me

but i cant seem to find it

in myself

how do you know you're beautiful?