Featured Student Work: Poetry by Charis

“Mosaic” 
by Charis

Red, blue, gold, silver.

Shiny, matte, transparent, cloudy.

Rough, smooth, worn, jagged.

Look at all these broken pieces.

They have shattered.

They are useless. 

They are broken.

Abandoned. 

Lost.

Weary.

Afraid.

Alone.

There is no hope,

Not for mere shards,

Not for these.

What now can they produce?

What more can they give?

They lie defective on the ground,

Overlooked by the productive ones.

But defeated pieces have a purpose,

If only they will come together,

Unified

Under something larger than themselves

–Than their brokenness–

A Mosaic.

Different colors, tones, and textures

Now complement each other

Because shattered fragments are beautiful

When mortar binds, cures them together

These lives are changed forever

And create a lovely community.

Now there is hope. 

Red, blue, gold, silver.

Shiny, matte, transparent, cloudy.

Rough, smooth, worn, jagged.

Look at all these broken pieces!

Would you have thought that they could fit together

In such unimaginable, beautiful ways?

From time to time I will feature student work here on the blog (always with their permission). Charis wrote this poem in 2023 after one of our tutoring sessions that involved trying to use vivid imagery. I particularly love her use of punctuation in this poem — the variety brings the words and word-pictures to life! She is a talented writer who has a lifetime of word composing ahead of her.