Parsa Raza

Honorable Mention: Poetry

“The Cycle of Life” 
by Parsa Raza
10th grade, East Brunswick High School

—

The porch light flickers, gathering the moths—
A dozen frantic sails of paper weave
Against the glass until the shadow drops.
The morning sweeps them from the concrete steps,
Uncounted in the ledger of the lost.

We lay our lives as sediment, like ash
Falling in silence on the quiet floor:
The dust of skin, the fiber of old wool,
The slow, unnoted wearing of the sill
Where hands have rested watching for the rain.

They paint the world a circle, neat and round,
A perfect ring of silver or of gold,
And promise everything must find its home.
But that’s the lie that makes the spirit cold;
The things that leave do not return again.

Not in the cadence of a vanished voice,
Not in the quiet color of the eyes,
Nor the peculiar music of a laugh.
The grass that grows above the sunken ground
Is only grass; it cannot read a name,
Nor cradle memories you hold—it thrives
On secret nitrogen, and nothing more.

We praise the April bud, the brilliant green
That fractures through the hardened winter crust,
But we forget the suffocating weight
Of everything that had to turn to dust
To make the heavy soil yield to life.

To bring the leaf, the forest has to choke
On its own dead, on years of fallen limbs,
And birds that fell too early from the nest.
The fragrance of the spring is just the scent
Of ancient losses turning into mud.

We walk through woods and call the quiet peace,
But it’s a graveyard built on top of graves,
A silent, frantic struggle for the light
Where every sapling wants the old tree dead
To claim its portion of the shifting sky.

The patriarch drops its heavy arms and falls,
A century of rings undone in beats,
And all the fragile things that clung to it—
The moss, the lichen, and the nesting wren—
Are thrown into the chaos of the floor.

The forest moves because it cannot stop,
Uncaring of the monuments it breaks.
You spend the first two decades getting big,
Stretching your limbs and wishing for the years
To hurry up and put you in the room
Where all the real things happen.

You assume
The growth is permanent, a castle wall
That you are building brick by heavy brick,
Until you hit the ceiling of your life,
The quiet apex where the climbing ends,
And realize the masonry is salt,
And every rain is washing it away.

Your body is a ledger of defeats:
The joint that clicks, the tooth that starts to loosen,
The sudden winter showing in the glass.
These aren’t just signs of growing older; they’re
The little thefts that happen while you sleep.

The world demands its pieces back from you;
It lent you strength, and now it calls the loan,
It lent you breath, and every single sigh
Is just a partial payment on the debt.

You spend the second half of living just
Defending what you have against the wind,
Closing the windows, locking up the doors,
Trying to keep the water in a cup
That has a hundred microscopic cracks.

And every friend you make is just a wager
Against the inevitability of tears.
You look across the table at the face
You’ve come to know as safely as your own,
And in the middle of a sentence comes
The cold, intrusive shadow of the truth:

One of you will be left to sit alone
And look at that empty chair across the room.
One of you will have to hold the coat
And wonder what to do with all the space.

We want the world to be a gentle thing,
A mother holding everything she made,
But nature has a heavy, iron hand
That doesn’t feel the weight of what it crushes.

The spider eats the fly within the web,
The hawk takes down the rabbit in the snow,
And neither one is cruel, and neither one is good;
They’re only following the lonely script
That forces them to kill to stay alive.

The sadness isn’t that the world is mean;
The sadness is that it is indifferent.
It does not have a heart to feel the ache
Of all the tiny, individual ends.

A million creatures draw their final breath
Before the sun can even reach the noon,
And not a single cloud will change its shape,
And not a single wave will hold its peace.

The ocean beats the cliffside into sand,
Graining the stone that took an age to form,
Turning the mountain into drifted dust
To bottom out the dark, unlighted sea.

And what of us, who think we stand above
The simple rhythm of the field and stream?
We build our fragile towers to the sky,
And carve our names on everything we touch.

But weeds will never read the epitaph;
They split the heavy vault to find the light,
Bleaching the chiseled letters into dust,
And swallowing our memory in the dark.

It’s beautiful, they say, the way it spins,
The endless wheel of water, earth, and air.
They write the songs to make the horror kind,
To give a purpose to the empty spaces.

They tell you that the ones you lost are stars,
Or that they’re sleeping in the summer rain,
Or that they’re part of something large and grand.
But when you’re standing in the quiet room,
With nothing but the ticking of the clock
And the terrible, expanding weight of loss,
The grand design is nothing but a threat.

The circle isn’t something that sustains;
It is a heavy, iron-toothed machine
That grinds the living world to functional dust.
It asks for everything you ever loved,
Demands the marrow from your very bones,
And promises you nothing in return
Except a patch of weeds you’ll never see,
Growing from the things you used to be.