By: Rena Su, Pacific Academy High School
Editor’s Note: Alison Wick
This spring, The Writer’s Art, a club run by SFU students passionate about poetry and literature, hosted their inaugural BC Youth Poetry Contest. The contest was open to young writers from across B.C. and this year’s theme was “Born from Ashes.” The poems were judged based on relevance, originality, and technical ability by a panel of SFU students.
The winner of this year’s contest was Rena Su, a 15-year-old student from Pacific Academy High School in Surrey. The Peak has been given permission to publish her poem, Her Own Memorial, on the-peak.ca so that the winner’s work can be shared. Find the poem, in full, below.
- i) HER OWN MEMORIAL
She found herself in a sterile room, empty
Buried within roads of bandages
Epitaphs etched upon open scars branded
In pools of ashen skin
‘Acid Attack Victim’ meant
The ensnaring vines of wires
Tightening around her body
Constrained.
Caged.
Coiled.
By a thousand white snakes.
She was no longer epitome of a golden age
Instead fabric buried her golden face of flaws.
The sink mirror showed a stranger.
Glaring; grimacing through winding waves of gauze.
She grimaced back. It burns.
The girl bride remembered
The day she wore gold chooriyan bands
Veneered with crimson
As she aimlessly glided to the bhangra with grace
Her lehenga drifted and her bangles glistened
Pain lingered in her beaded ankles but also
Behind her sweat-beaded face
He asked for her hand — with the crowd watching
A mutter amidst strumming of Indian folk chords
He was thirty-six. She was sixteen.
The cheers of the relatives said yes for her.
While a rejection rested upon her vocal cords
It burns.
She remembers
His constellation of gifts.
Of foreign sweets and bollywood movies
Amid those boxes were questions of marriage
Once and once more
They burnt her.
It still burns.
Is she gone? Inside she screams and calls
But to no reply — only the clock shuffled on.
She gazes towards the bandaged monster
Who suffocates within the white shawl.
The constellation of gifts became constellations of broken glass
Torn like her grades and tests; mangled like the skin on her back
Those bottles were empty but the more he drank the emptier
He became.
And he poured acid. When she ran.
As if the world’s trail diverges
Into meanderings of the multitude
Of things in her mind, sprinting
From all the trouble, sparring
The echoes that say it’s her fault.
Her peeling eyes still see his face
It burns.
The hospital linoleum becomes burning flashes
Beauty’s widow ponders as her skin is seared
What would become of her
What good is born from mere ashes?
What good?
The echo becomes rhetoric to the winds,
Away to the boulevards of Kanpur
As she absorbs the sizzling anger
Embedded on her face, blazing fires
Not of hell
But of scorching, searing injustice tattooed
Upon her golden russet shoulders
Broken out of the shackles of chooriyan, washed of vows
- ii) POST-CREMATION PRELUDE
She peers back at the stranger of the mirror
Traversing down the lines of gauze with her finger
She wears the sweltering deserts, blazing sun
On the side of her cheek.
She runs down her skin and sees
The valleys of dawn
She gazes and finds rivers of power
On her tongue, and she speaks
Past the drowning liquid flame
May she rise.
Like smoke and the fire
She will rise.
Past the unbounded inferno of injustice
Past Hatred’s smoldering chains.
Candlelit kerosene no longer an entity within a lantern
But a flame powerful and consuming
The fuels of Injustice’s ammunition
Prelude to a rising phoenix
She found herself in a sterile room, empty
Taking threads off bandages, unravelling.
As she uncovers the flames on her skin, rattling.
Her story too shall burn on.
‘Acid Attack Victim’ meant
Resilience.
Resilience. Amid pain. Amid suffering.
Resilience. Towards the unknowable.
Liquid fire burnt away her skin
But the fire inside her remained, uncontrollable
As it burns and burns
And as it burns away the shadows of lament
The sink mirror shows — Her.
Peering. Focusing.
Scars.
But only a scarred face,
Not a scarred heart.
She smiled back, a phoenix.
Rising from Transgression’s embers,
She burns — Glowing.
