By Isaac Yohannes Yebio
12th grade | Jackson-Reed High School | District of Columbia
Finalist, Climate and Environment category
With lines from “King of the Dammed” by Hannah Lucinda Smith, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
Tekelioğlu, you were once a mirror—
& even the moon bent to drink from you.
Now, the sky swallows its own light.
There is a boy peeling figs beside
a rusted anchor,
his mouth full of sweet rot.
Once, fish leapt from your chest like
prayers startled awake.
Now, only tortoises knocking
at dry doors,
asking where the water went.
The dam is a mouth sealed with coins—
each one stamped with the face
of a man who thinks god
is something he can build.
I watched a shepherd lead his sheep
across your cracked skin.
Each hoof a psalm. Each breath a betrayal.
& still, the state plants wheat
like a forgiveness it never earned.
They harvest the lake’s bones
& call it progress.
The body is a blade that knows how to bloom.
But what about the body
that was a lake?
What does it mean when blooming
looks like drying?
When the lake vanished,
the birds rewrote their prayers mid-flight.
My brother, too, is learning
a new direction.
He irons his shirt like an offering
& boards a bus bound for Izmir,
where the sky is too crowded
to remember water.
What is left behind?
A boat without a name.
A photograph hung like a wound.
Men paying taxes on silence.
In the tea shop, he stirs his cup
& tastes a decade.
His hands: maps
to a place no longer on the map.
He says Allah knows what will happen.
But even God must mourn
a paradise gone mute.
& I? I write this as if
language can be a river.
As if a poem
might carry the water back.
Tell me—
if a lake dies
& no one listens,
did it ever sing?
Or do we only love a place
once it begins
to disappear?
Isaac Yebio is a senior from Washington, D.C. His work has been recognized by the the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, Strathmore, and the Wooly Mammoth Theatre.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.