Lauren Lin 

Posted byContent EditorPosted inidentity, youth poet laureate

Lauren Lin is the Inaugural Burlingame-Hillsborough Youth Poet Laureate and San Mateo County Youth Poetry Ambassador. She is a two-time Youth Speaks poetry slam winner who weaves passions, beliefs, and emotions into her work. Lin’s poetry has received awards from YoungArts, Literary Legacies, and the MLK Step into the Light youth arts contest. Lin founded and leads Words for Change, a coalition of young writers and activists eager to spur social change with written and spoken language. Readers can find her work in The Offing, Entanglements (Hunger Button Books, 2022), Quilted Voices (Poetry Nation, 2023), and the 2023 YoungArts anthology, among other publications.

Poem on Belonging

I AM

I am.

From the bloated harvest moon
Peeking behind its silken veil
At the splattered scarlet below
Running in the tears sown

Pooled at the fissure of flesh
And the splinter of hearts
Beating to the rhythm of war
And a family’s scattered shards

From the mirror once intact
Once holding light
And a youth that burned
With the twist of the urn

I am.

From molded chrysalis 
Her wings bent, crumpled
And a childhood missed
Drowned in the abyss

As swords hacked the fields
The glint of the silver eel
Slithering up golden and green
One more life sealed

But she rose again
For meager wages
In the battle waged
Her mother’s life to save

I am.

From her. 
Grandma.

Her footprints in the sand
Leading from China hues
To a New World of old sorrow
Another slap of fate’s backhand

For even in the Land of Dreams
Were the torn seams
Of her ripped hope
In the fingers of all she’d seen

I am.

From more than torn words
And her marriage to misery
And her losses to death
I’m from the seeds she buried.

The life she planted
A garden of promise
Amid storms and mist
And her shriveled chrysalis 

It grows still
With all the memories she poured
And the steel in her will
Her gaze up the windowsill

For I am 
The peeking harvest moon
Holding Grandma in its hands
Beaming harmonies to her hope
As always it stands.

I am.

Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Lin. Used with permission of the author.

Read Lauren Lin’s ecopoem, “Memories of Earth”. Lauren is also a contributor to the collaborative poem, “The Many Voices Word Karaoke”.