I Have Given It a Thought… Kate Kowalczyk

I Have Given It a Thought…

I have given it a thought. About how the world would be. If everything doesn't revolve around the same thing. The same ideas. The same minds. The same people of the same kind. And a big clock above all of our heads slowly ticking away time. Like a honeybee hive with thousands of bees. Working their lives away in a never-ending system. In their small hive in their big tree. For me it's so similar to modern day times because we people seem to be working in a hive robotically like machines. We eat and we walk, and we steal and we talk aimlessly about money and land and never about how to make a stand. And they send us to schools where we are taught not how to learn and live in a society whose standards are so amazingly unfair, but how to solve for x and the area of a square. Or how people think they are not good enough, which will never be true. Because no one can dictate your own selfworth, but you. And you can sit with yourself and your thoughts everyday, but I know that you wouldn't be able to stay knowing that your mind may be crowded with scary things. How you are afraid of the future and what it may bring. Because nothing is forever and thinking that may feel like a sting. And one day you could wake with everything the same and by nightfall you could feel like you have changed because every day matters. So, I have given it a thought, about the grooves and pattern that everybody seems to fall into eventually. Without a powerful poetical purpose. We sit in our cubicles where we stare at a screen for hours on end and then work our butts off to go home and pretend that

nothing else matters except money and power and how much you get paid an hour. And a white man that lived long before today, invented a system with money to pay For things that other people will eventually throw away. And it will end up in Oceans and volcanoes of trash erupting with sadness and turning to ash. So is it worth it? You can't possibly think so, right? How could you possibly sleep at night when you know that somewhere there are movements of peace and equality called riots and words of bad quality. Or, somewhere people can't walk alone at night because they are afraid to be taken and they know that they can't fight. And somewhere are pushed to the back of the line we call life to wait another year or so to fight for what's right. So yes, I have given it a thought. How the world would be Without the same people Without the same minds With a new mindset With a new fate. Where billions of people live of all genders and races Like a willow tree with millions of leaves, Or all the fish swimming freely in the sea. Oh what a lovely thought that can be.

Kate Kowalczyk, Grade 7 Lake Harriet Upper School, Minneapolis Teaching Artist, Frank Sentwali