By 7th-Grader Penny Andreas
Wednesdays, Blog students respond to creative prompts. Sometimes, as in Penny’s case here, the creative response morphs into a full-fledged blog post. This particular prompt was borrowed from Poets&Writers: The Time Is Now: “Page as Canvas,” Fiction Prompt.
Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Sam Esmail’s forthcoming film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, HBO’s miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—novels with apocalyptic themes are appearing on screen more and more. Whether through satire or stark realism, this suspenseful setting allows writers to explore profound themes of survival, friendship, trust, hope, and resiliency.
Poets&Writers
Our bloggers’ assignment: Inspired by apocalypse novels, imagine the end of a modern civilization. What follows is Penny’s response in verse.
The last string.
The end of a modern civilization
The shortening of population
The stop of an endless creation
The ruins of a unhinged foundation
But the beginning of devastation
The start of agonizing situation
The rise of a falling nation
The awakening of isolation
The abrupt stop of our rotation
The question of never ending hibernation
Something of no explanation
Something without any information
Something beyond imagination
The ending of our generation
The beginning of separation.
The endless echoes of screaming
About what’s beyond our dreaming
Nothing’s real, as it seems
That it’s all been some scheme
Whether it was life or death,
And endless stream
Of life taking away the giving of what was meant to gleam.
But now all we see,
Is the decay that now lies at our feet.
The years of endless heat
The cracks below the concrete
The things that were incomplete,
The wrinkles and folds,
Permanent on our sheets.
But now forget about the things
That devastation may bring
But as we lie here in silence,
We hear the earth breathe
Only for a few seconds….
Before we pull the last string.
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