Upward Bound contest winners announced
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PABLO — National TRIO Day represents the need to empower disadvantaged youths by acknowledging the wealth of experience they offer our diverse communities. Providing students an open space and a safe platform for self-discovery and reflection has been a cornerstone of the Upward Bound program. To this end, Salish Kootenai College Upward Bound created an essay contest to serve as an artistic element of TRIO Day activities where students of the program demonstrate their abilities of personal expression. Students were given questions to guide them in their responses, and were directed with the following prompts:
What’s unique about you?
What is your dream for the world?
What is your biggest challenge, and how have you overcome it?
Who is a hero in your life?
What does community mean to you?
Student submissions were evaluated on writing competency, creativity, and originality. Prizes for the contest included a choice of graphing calculator or a $50-$100 shopping trip to Barnes & Nobles to buy books.
Kassidy Rubel earned first place for her personal essay “Imperium”; Second place went to Marlon Starblanket for his poem “Helper”; Geneva des Lions took third place for her poem, “Pearls in an Hourglass.”
Honorable mentions were awarded to Syndey Castor, Alexia Parizeau, Jenna Mullaney, and Berit DeGranpre for their thoughtful contributions to the theme and philosophy of the contest.
We are pleased by the quality and diverse representations we received and would like to thank everyone who submitted personal responses to these questions and for their sincere engagement with the creative process.
Winners:
Pearls in an Hourglass
By definition,
I am Homo sapiens,
Human,
A living, dying, fragile fabric:
Strung together cells, molecules, atoms;
An astoundingly accidental wisp of dust.
But how can I live with this description?
How could any such amalgam bear to live in a universe In which we are all analytically uniform specks
On this blue-green micro-anomaly we call home?
So strict a definition and yet so much detail it omits.
What if we look again?
I am a child,
Born, among many in a tiny glint of time
Upon a new millennium.
I am one of many people who have the privilege to see
Even one moment of the vast blooming of the impossible Lotus
Which is our reality.
I wish that this blooming would never end,
That the petals would unfurl forever and never reach their most beautiful, For every flower dies after it is at its loveliest.
But I know that there is no such flower,
And that this world,
As the lotus,
As every bud and bloom,
Will eventually wilt.
Another imposing truth.
How to live between the terror of eternal darkness
And the blinding truth of a predetermined birthright?
We must know how beautifully chaotic that pristine light is.
We are all the most elegant permutations of happenstance.
Every atom
Of every molecule
Of every cell
Of every
You
Coalesced precisely
In its own discordant dance
To create something perfectly,
Extraordinarily,
Unique.
Though we are all the same dust
Flowing endlessly over the same sandy rock,
The winds of the world spin us on ever-spiraling paths,
And as we each take our tum twisting down through the hourglass, I know that I am a perfectly new grain of sand,
And that while I am but a moment to the stream of time,
There never has been, nor ever will be one like it,
And choose to make it
A most splendid crystal of glass;
Because by my actions and by my birth,
By nature and by nurture,
I am just as much a grain of sand in an ocean
As the heart of a pearl in an hourglass.
~ By Geneva des Lions
