By Kyle Pham
8th grade | Walker Junior High School | California
Finalist, Peace and conflict category
With lines from "Growing Up During Wartime" by Natalie Keyssar, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
We laugh through sirens,
hide our smiles in subway shadows
classrooms flicker to life
beneath layers of concrete and fear.
We were packed into a gymnasium lined with mats,
as if growing up was a sport we could win.
We build drones in basements,
wire dreams into circuitry,
not for grades or fame,
but for fathers on the front.
We learn velocity and vengeance
like language. We are fluent.
The windows in our bedrooms
remember more than we do:
the day the glass blew in,
the sirens that sang us to sleep.
This is where we study history,
as it drafts itself in real time.
Karina’s cherry blossoms bloomed
beside the echo of shellfire.
We stage photo shoots
in fields still learning peace.
Hope poses for the lens
even when the frame shudders.
We teach how to stop a bleed
before we learn calculus.
Dasha’s birthday gift was gauze,
not cake. “I don’t have time to go to school,”
she said, holding pressure
where the world split open.
Still, we write,
because writing is rebellion too,
blue mascara and calloused hands,
mourners and medics in one breath.
This age we never chose
will not silence our song.
Kyle is an 8th grader attending Walker Junior High School in La Palma, California. He loves playing volleyball, playing games with his friends and going out. He aspires to have a job in engineering, although he is unsure whether he really wants to pursue this career.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.