Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase: 2026 Young Poet Contest Winners

Who Said?
By Eve Browne – Thomas S. Wootton High School

Who says there has to be sadness?
Who said I couldn’t just touch my fingers to the earth And let my love flow into the soil?
God knows our roots need it. Who says there has to be chaos?
Who said I have to quarter Famine and War and Pollution in my head And let them ravage me?
Their kingdoms stretch too far already – they don’t get my heart, too. Who says life has to be gray?
Who made living vicariously, vociferously, vivaciously a crime punishable by death?
Don’t we dish our dimes for color, don’t we sell our souls for art? Aren’t you sick of seeing gray on grey on gray?
Who says life’s got to be hatred?
Who said that my love has no roots here? Who says I can’t pour out my diamond words
And refuse to believe those who call them rocks? Who says I am not –
Who said I cannot be – Magic?

Where the Shadows Wait for You
By Jacy Duan – Richard Montgomery High School

i don’t remember the first time i saw you, only that the room forgot how to hold me.

when you smiled, your eyes crinkled like the pages of a fairytale romance,
but the one that tries to forget its own ending. you were once punctual,
like daylight staining a room
before the darkness learned its name. first you stopped arriving on time,
then you stopped arriving at all.

now i practice your name soundlessly, so the broken, untouched mug of coffee is unable to reject it;
so the ceiling fan doesn’t pause its spinning to listen.

but after all, you told me red was the color of love, so i never questioned the stain in the margins.
i didn’t ask what happens when the blood turns to ash. only now do i recall that you cannot read this.
not because you choose not to, but because the words i write require a pulse to understand.

Betrayal It Is
By Lily Gough – Poolesville High School

Khara Khoto (The Black City) was a kingdom in the Gobi desert, established in the reign of Genghis Khan. It prospered during the Silk Road, serving as a pit stop for travelers. During the Ming Dynasty, military forces took over their river. This caused everyone to die of thirst. Mythology in the surrounding area states that the ruler, Khara Bator, killed his wife and family so they would not have to suffer.

Cowardice, you called it to leave our people to die. For as they supported us with their crops, we must support them now
I was a mere figurehead standing next to you silently It was such torture watching you slowly shrivel
Like that of the meadow crane’s bill, wilting swiftly as winter approaches. You slowly drying up, like that of the water thyme after a drought
Even the Gruiforme flees when the fish dry up. Begging, pleading for you to leave with me, knowing you never would. Even as I gaze at you now, peaceful in death, grief and guilt suffocating my heart
Our love, like that of Orpheus and Eurydice, doomed from the start to be ended prematurely
Peering out the window, the people wake with the sun
Children running to wake their friends to play, their joy hardly masking the sunken eyes and dry skin
Running without care for the bodies around them, the corpses’ hair blowing silently as the wind picks up
I return back to your words, a reminder of all I have yet to do I lay beside you, my body crumbling slowly
Finally I may join you, my burdens leaving my shoulders. The giggling of children still ringing in my ears, growing fainter
Betrayal you will call it, betrayal it is

Dear Jim
By Shibani Mishra – Richard Montgomery High School

i’m not sure if you are seeing this, if you believed you could (perhaps you were an atheist).
when i drove by, your name was in colored graffiti on some nearby tunnel next to the word RIP.
whether in a new life, or in heaven, or in a rich patch of soil, i hope you are- resting in peace that is.

i envision you as a businessman, with a wife and two kids,
who wore a striped tie on the weekdays and a shirt that said “man of the house.” who walked crooked on friday nights and brainstormed sobriety test ideas the next morning.
who went fishing with his friends and wrote poetry on the docks.
who clapped when planes landed and held the door open for strangers.

but the truth is i’ll never know.
maybe you were scared of heights and hated children.
maybe you had instagram comments taken down and one too many bans from the liquor store.
maybe you couldn’t read or tie a tie or eat seafood.

i guess that’s what hope is.
it’s a glint of stardust amidst a black hole, the anchor’s crown, hardly hanging on through the storm.
it’s my decision to give you the benefit of the doubt,
the last grain of stardust even as the world plummets into shambles.

you jim, to whom i can attribute nothing but a sloppy, bubble-lettered name, yet still have hope in the reasons it was remembered on a random tunnel.

We Already Had Our Own
By Evvaleen Robinson – Montgomery Blair High School

Our cries, our polaroid tears, unto the world which has Triumphed in war and prides itself on singing the people,
Because of the melanin on our skin which they believe to be unrighteous-
Because of the melanin on children’s skin, which they believe to be impure whilst we do nothing but coat our fingertips in paint and let our canvas reflect the blunt end of the scrutiny we face in this new land,
This new land which has existed infinitely shorter than dreams have
And purposefully burning into the skin of our people a warning to conform,
To become an erasure of the museum that is us, our history, a mutation of our own voices; They called it “art”- We already had our own

I must retreat to my own dreams to remember a world in which I might speak,
And if I so choose, the world would not cave in on itself and create an inferno beneath our very museums
The dream is simple, as much as laying down to rest and tearing through the nebula of my eyelids We view everything as celestial, beautiful, an act of preservation, so that in our heads we may at least dream of that world in which we were not burned when we came to this country,
Which, and we hold each others hearts with rusted nails as we say this-
Will have shamed us for desiring the treatment of our neighbor whose ancestors despised our foreign land, and scorned us for mastering their language if our skin did not allow it in their minds I found myself chasing after the dream with a camera, in the middle of a desert plain carved to fit circuses bearing strange fruits, that don’t jest but be truthful, that I am meant to archive by this modern device
The ringmaster juggles bottles of wine sealed with cork, threatening to spill and intoxicate the world with revolution; The world where video evidence of our dream will shatter the dreams of our oppressors

murmuration
By Mina Simon-Ogan – Montgomery Blair High School

you are watching the sky fold itself into motion a hundred bodies shifting as one
a shape that changes with each heartbeat and somehow always survives

you think of your mother, her hands soft and steady how she lifted you before the world could
and your aunt’s voice calling from the porch teaching you to move together

when danger brushed the edges of your life
you learned how one glance could ripple through the circle how instinct could become choreography
and grace could be learned in fear

the village was never just a place
it was arms, and eyes, and whispers hands braiding futures into hair songs hummed under breath

you did not know the word murmuration but you knew its shape
that beauty could rise out of defense and no one needed to lead

Sweet and Sour Smells
By Annabel Taylor – Walt Whitman High School

Rice fields teem with fatigued, bent over workers
Laboring through the stifling days — hot and sticky like xoi rice

At the orphanage, salty tears sting young eyes Men and women with yellow hair visit
They come from lands far away to give them toys, pens, books and hugs Then they leave, for they do not know our story

Tourists look down from high perched balconies, Oblivious at what lies beneath the beauty
They bask on our beaches
Where the driftwood is weathered and yellow like the skin of plantains Where the peppercorn sand is raw and black

Humid nights are sunken in despair A country drunken in hot air
The sunsets are sanguine red,
an artist’s canvas of rouge pigments — and blue for the gushing riverbend

The war, now fought in memory, melds into the landscape We watch our dreams ripen, then rot
But we return to our gardens every spring and sow new seeds under the soggy earth

Those who could, fled
Those who couldn’t continue to breathe the smells of Vietnam The sweet and the sour

For more information on the Local Writer’s Showcase, please visit https://www.bethesda.org/bethesda/localwriters