Regine Henry
My Generation
Not The Who song,
but the people who don’t know if they’ll be able to
own a house by the time they’re 30.
Time spirals down in long ribbons, each more tattered than the last.
Sheared wool descends in sheets of wildfires, wild flowers pop up
in between
rusted gears and pieces of rebar left over in
dustrial revolutions around the sun are not fully a year,
but we say they are anyway.
Sky rains acid tears where the sun don’t shine
I don’t know
what that means when a black hole
is leaking from my ears and
gas giants surround my head
strong and feet weak,
do I move to get the lead out?
You can lead a man to water,
but you cannot force him to love him
self-inflicted isolation,
rites of passage are never afforded to
an alien with glass bones and paper skin,
too weak to speak up for themselves at the braiders.
Too dishonest with their own
feelings of absurdity are winning, do you hear me?
Your apathy speaks to me in frequencies I am too young to understand.
Frequent stagnation nauseates
as if my neuroses were not enough.
As if death were just a state of
matters of which you cannot comprehend
yet you delude yourself into thinking that you can.
Regine Henry is an avid writer and a senior at the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts. When they are not working on their book, they songwrite, skateboard, and draw.
I wrote “Conservation of Few” when asked to write about my place in the world. I immediately thought about the current issues that plague my generation. Climate change, gun control, unwalkable cities, unaffordable housing. Sustainability is important to me and my peers, and I feel as if a lot of older generations don’t care about it because they won’t see the worst of the world without it in their lifetimes. I think we have no choice. When bombs raze Gaza and wildfires tear up the West, it feels like the world is burning. Isn’t it our responsibility to at least try to put out the flames?
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