The Start of Artistic Creativity

The Eternal Struggle 

By: Jacklynn Bozeman

Stargazing

Tonight, as the streetlamp flickers hello-goodbye to me on my way to the backroad,

Silence is my passenger;

The silence that I so often push away,

The silence I smother with melodies and conversations about weather and classwork.

The poison silence,

The silence that quietly crushes you in crowded hallways,

In moments spent in solitary.

Tonight I will finally sit aside this silence beneath weighty darkness,

Darkness stirred by fireflies a million light years away.

I will reach out to my soul,

As it hands me the secrets that were kept under lock and key,

Secrets that filled attics gathering cobwebs and dust,

Ever-slowly weaved into soft layers by the loom of time.

These objects of the soul I will meekly offer to those fireflies flanked by shadow,

As the silence now seeps into folds and cracks,

So deep and imperceptible as the breath of the Earth.

- Lily Baldwin, 10/15/25