Once Upon a Time
Van Nuys, CA
2024, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
“Once upon a time”—a phrase for the books—
Initiated stories through the ages.
Surviving the passage of time, it told the journeys
Of maidens.
The fairest of them all sang desperately,
Fear blurred into sweet notes;
Enduring the foreboding of the silence,
She ventured into the scorched forest.
It was not a while before she stopped,
Horrified and unable to conceive
The charred corpses of her faithful friends,
lying motionless on the singed leaves.
The sea-foam spirit dozed on a sun-kissed crag,
When suddenly a gruesome sight appeared:
A familiar guppy bobbing on the blue surface.
Terror threatening to close her throat, she dove
Into the unassuming waters.
Searing burns shot through her writhing tail;
she clutched the crag, to no avail.
When night set in, two fishermen went to shore and muttered absentminded nothingness
for her corroded body.
Within a decrepit kingdom slumbered a beauty,
unaware of the fire that blazed outside,
for her kingdom—draped with desiccated thorns—
was in dire need of storms. A tiny spark
Set ablaze the withered encasings, spreading
An omniscient surprise. The feeble castle,
with the briar trapped, broke down with no one alive.
“Once upon a time”—a phrase for the books,
Initiated stories through the ages.
Crumbling under the despotic sky,
It told the defeat
Of maidens.
Reflection
When I wrote my poem, I aimed to convey how climate change has affected my life as a youth. The first time I learned about climate change was at age 11, and its horrific impacts jarred my senses. The climate crisis was thoroughly depressing, and from this despondency stemmed my sense of responsibility to fight against it. To express this transition from naivety to proactivity, I was inspired to write about people who epitomized our childhood innocence—Disney princesses—but with a dark twist. By modernizing a venerable narrative, I wanted to relay the urgent crisis our world faces because of climate change. Undertaking this writing project, I learned that it is crucial for us—the younger generations—to stir up the childhood vivacity we may have lost in ourselves and others for the world we’ll inherit. To future readers: don’t be afraid of my (admittedly) twisted imagination, but be afraid of the real danger of climate change ahead of us.