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.
Ecopoem
MEMORIES OF EARTH
Each drop an orb of glass Upon beds of rippling mirrors For the splash to earth Is a reflection of its past And so she mourns Deeply in her soul of clouds From above her tears pour Dripping like plummeting stones Each a splatter of bitter betrayal For she remembers Remembers like the kiss of fire Remembers like the stab of lightning Remembers like the knot of snapped vines Her gifts sacrificed to them Those tiny twigs she’d loved Who stood on their twin trunks And grew strands of silken web From heads of bursting fruit They who had spoken And wrote And laughed And loved her And killed And took And clawed For more beyond The presents in her soil They who had sharpened their tools Drilled into her belly For the oil in her veins And her bones of bark She remembers The way their smiles Twisted On her. Until finally Her body crumbled As the air in her lungs Faded. And her blood Extracted. Only then might they know And remember Her love And their flesh-filled claws They’d sunk into her blessings But will they ever know? How she’d loved? So her tears plunge Hoping to soak them And remind them But even she Loses her gaze with the stars And freezes her sorrow Enough tears, she quells For she cannot bear To see in the mirror they paint The years she gave To they who only chewed Away.
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Lin. Used with permission of the author.
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