National Poetry Month comes around every April, and this year we’re celebrating by highlighting student poets at Central. Each one provided a favorite poem they wrote, along with thoughts on their own poetry-writing process.
People write poems for a variety of reasons, such as expressing emotions or just for creative fun. Ari Reyes, a senior at Champaign Central High School, enjoys writing poems “in [his] free time,” and for very specific reasons. He says that poems are especially helpful “when there is a big issue or [he] needs to let off some steam.”
“Usually,” he said, “[my poems] come from a very big emotion like loss, love, sadness, or happiness.” Below is an example of one of these poems and a heartbreaking reminder of love and loss.
I Saw You (Abridged)
By Ari Reyes
I let myself astray wandering on the streets of New York, just to pass by another cafe.
I don’t want to carry a bouquet just to let it wilt away.
I know I’m the one making your hair grey.
My eyes look for my dear, you were sitting on the bed.
With your scent on the sheets. There you were.
I’ve always wanted to go dancing
I crave for all kinds of romancing
Yet all I do is runaway from all these clichés
My gloves wrap around my hands for a warm touch,
And my fingers run on the cloth of my cuffs.
I’m ashamed to say that they are my only clutch.
But I know it’s all my fault, that I keep it all inside.
Disasters inside a vault in my heart.
Glued together by fantasies,
While I close my eyes to reality just to keep it from ripping apart.
Another poem written by a student at Central, titled “Birth of a Spirit,” follows a more strict structure with four-line stanzas and an ABAB rhyme scheme. Leticia Filippe, a senior, wrote this poem, along with others, in her free time.
“It helps me destress and talk to myself about what I’m feeling at the moment. It helps me release everything in my mind” said Filippe, as she explained why she writes poems. She went on to say, “I think [poetry is] underrated because most people think it’s not important or confusing, but it can tell a lot about the reader or author.”
Birth of a Spirit
By Leticia Filippe
On a moonless night, I was born.
Alive, after simple words were spoken
And forever sworn
To be unspoken.
I was unwanted, a shame
That brought horror to my mother;
Because my birth was to blame
For all the doings of another.
My birth comes from a sin,
But I remain alive after signing a deal
That promised a win
In exchange to see the (un)real.
They don’t know I live
Inside this body of light,
In fact, they would never forgive
That I was born on a moonless night.
I am evil, I am cruel,
I am simply everything you fear.
Do not test how I rule,
Unless you want to face my spear.
Beware of what you say and do to me;
I may be stuck in here,
But I do know how to get free,
And I’ll hunt you until you disappear.
Conjured into life—
Never going back to the afterlife.
Leira Suon, another senior at Central, has been writing poems since 5th grade for a variety of reasons, from boredom to coping with stress. They say their “poems tend to be about realism and things that [they’ve] experienced as well as things that go on in the world around [them].”
Their poetry tends to be straight from their mind onto the paper and ends up being free verse a lot of the time. “I don’t really have a structure [for] poems,” Suon said. “I kind of just write poems. I […] pick up a pen, get some paper, and start writing.”
The Silences
By Leira Suon
Fill the world around you with silences,
thats what You do,
If you dont speak out,
what does that mean for you?
Fill the World with Silences,
Let the darkness win?
Trump claims that Heaven believes in his sin,
Fill the World with Silences,
That what we all feel,
people like me suppressed,
by maga and people in these fields,
Fill the world with Silences,
If that is all you do,
then how will you protect the world,
The one We all once new,
Fill the World with Silences,
or you can stand,
Stand and be free,
Black Lives matter,
LGBTQ should be Free,
Well all have our rights, even goals too.
But if you stay Silent,
you will never feel at home.
You will never feel New
The next poem is written by Amy Graziano, a published poet who teaches AP English Literature and Composition at Central. Graziano fell in love with writing and poetry at a young age and has not stopped writing since.
“I’ve always written poems since I was nine years old,” Graziano said. “It’s one of the last true arts because it really is not lucrative, and the people who participate in it do it for the love of the art.”
Graziano certainly loves this form of art, with her favorite type of poetry being freeverse. She strongly stated “free the verse” when asked her opinion on structured poetry.
Ghosts
By Amy Graziano
When God takes a man he makes a baby,
or maybe he takes three men and leaves
one woman torpified, if I made that word,
I apologize, dear lord, for I am in your image,
it is only the porridge of the holy spirit.
When my husband takes money
he leaves an aloe plant. I like the upkeep,
little water, the gel-feel, in winter some flower.
Babies grow to resemble the men that God took,
their cheeks soft, their eyes and build, age-old.
What does God do with these men,
and why do some of them linger
in pubs or near piers, like mistakes,
half-sheen, destined to repeat themselves?
The final poem is written by Adelaide Kota, a Central senior who enjoys poetry as a method of working through strong emotions. “I write poems,” she said, “to help me process my thoughts and, generally, I think it helps me turn them into things that I’m less afraid of.”
Kota also said that she thinks of poetry as “a little lens into someone else’s world” and “little pieces of other people that we can hold on to.”
She enjoys creating these pieces of herself as well as reading pieces created by other people. Her favorite poet is Whitney Houston whose anthology, titled Home, Kota read and loved. “I really enjoyed it because it was about love and finding yourself, but also just sadness in a sense.”
Untitled
By Adelaide Kota
There’s a great magnolia tree in the yard
which gives me each year
one week of pale discus blooms
It’s my sign
that warm days are coming
that dandelions
and those small purple buds
will soon arrive.
And after the week, a rain or two,
the petals have shriveled
and browned upon the branches
But I saw one,
just one flower,
in the center
it’s soft pink petals shrouded
in brown
I try not to look at it,
afraid it will disappear
afraid of what it means
when it’s gone.
But I peeks back once,
just once,
and there it was.
The true spirit of poetry, as explored in this article, varies depending on every person who writes and reads each poem. As Reyes said, “Poetry is like an expression of what you really think. You don’t have to share it with anybody. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive. It can be complete nonsense, but it means something to you.”
