The Colors of Our Future
by Ellie Lyla Lerner
Where the pot of gold used to lie is now a vortex of gasoline,
a gloss, floating on the water we hold most dear.
This rainbow is not the fairy tale book ambassador.
This rainbow is not the refraction of colors, arching over a reborn world.
No longer will crystal clear water droplets fill storybooks and poems with multicolored hope.
For this rainbow is a story of muddy water, dirty streets and songs of smog.
The rainbow was a covenant to the people,
the world will not be destroyed again.
No longer is this true.
No longer does the rainbow cast its watery gaze upon the people as a promise of hope.
The rainbow, hovering on the water, discarded gasoline afloat, is an adulterated version of a prism that used to be.
The once beautiful refraction which, sleepily wakes the spring dew
Is now a spectrum of muddy greed.
The epitome of hope is a splay of tainted and distorted colors,
the future that children splash in.
Great stagnant puddles on the roadside, collecting the waste of tailpipes passing by,
is a muddle of a rainbow.
Ellie Lerner is a current ninth grader at the Urban School of San Francisco.