Free Flow — Lauren Schram ‘22
Throughout quarantine, I spent a lot of my time outside, surrounded by nature in order to feel less trapped indoors. I changed my concentration to landscapes and the beauty and freedom felt within nature. Although I live near the ocean, my heart belongs to the mountainous and rocky landscapes out West as seen in this piece and many others. “Free Flow” captures free movement with the river that curves around the rock formations that one could feel while surrounded by nature. It also represents the flowing state of mind that I fall into when creating outdoors.
Droplets on Glass — Makena Senzon ‘24
In school, we were always taught that we learn history for the purpose of not repeating it, and yet it seems that we never learn. I find that as a society, we always go down the same wrong path, even though we know from the mistakes of our ancestors how it ends. I find that as smart as humans think we are, we are often controlled by the actions of others and what has happened before us, similarly to the way water acts with the laws of cohesion. This piece reflects a view of mankind through the lens of a car window during a storm.
Droplets on Glass
Society is dictated by the laws of water,
Trickling moments that become chapters in textbooks,
Carving gorges and canyons.
Droplets of rain on a car window,
The history of humanity on a pane of glass.
A storm brews in the sky
Pushing each drop to leap from what it knows,
A flash of lighting against gray gas, a clear droplet falls
Slicking on the window,
Finding the quickest way downward,
Sheets fall in the clouds’ wake, each drop finding the most traveled path,
Seduced by the ones that went before: cohesion.
Like a well-worn road, with divots bitten by cars of the same axle
When a revolutionary comes, it’s 1 out of a million,
They diverge from the path,
with a sudden gust of wind, a change of composition.
Many try to escape society but fail,
Regress to a common path.
They converge with others to grow heavier,
But always end up at the same destination.
The clouds do break, though, and when they do, the sun shines. Droplets cease their motion.
They splay out in clustered patterns,
and evaporation takes hold.
Soon nothing is left to tell their story.
Then, a new storm brews,
History plays out,
Over and over in an agonizing cycle:
rules, rebellions, inevitable ruin.