“This poem is about the current political climate in our country. While many millennials believe the world to be changing for the better, the overt bigotry and fear which have begun their rampant course have created a very personal sense of betrayal and hopelessness among us. It feels as though the world we knew was merely an illusion, and this poem strives to reflect those emotions.” -Laura Daley, junior
Camelot
By Joey Howard and Laura Daley
We have traveled miles of years to get to this place,
We have stumbled through trenches of tragedy and heartbreak,
Sawed through vines and tripped over stones and traveled.
When we climbed the golden cliffs of speeches from men and women beyond their times
Our time,
Beyond their race, their origin, their creed,
And we thought we had arrived at the peaks, remembering the valleys
Of those dressed in uniforms of hatred strapped across their chest,
We thought we had finally engraved our thoughts in the hearts of youth,
We thought we had finally carved progress into the root of every tree,
In this forest, all we could see was growth, desperate,
grasping for the olive branch we were founded upon
And then we heard it.
The wood-crackle
The ember-pop
We heard it.
The song of bigotry and fear and “nostalgia”
Sung by the “oppressed”
We thought we had planted the seeds of a world made over,
But we had simply painted the picture we had wanted to see
In watercolor,
But now the frame has fallen,
Nails ripped from drywall
Glass shattered on the tiles of floor
Like a fun house mirror,
Distortion as reality
And when we look closely,
you can see they had burned the whole forest down.
