By Maryam Farhan
20 | Karachi, Pakistan
Second-place young adult contest winner, Peace and Conflict category
With lines from "Young Palestinians Face a Steep Toll on Mental Health" by Kern Hendricks, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
the pen was supposed to matter.
they told him the pen was mightier,
so he picked it up
and never put it down.
not when the lights went out,
not when the building that held his research
became rubble that held his neighbors,
not when the university
became a memory people argued about
on the internet.
"I was terrified, actually. It could be me next." he was terrified too.
he kept writing anyway.
he submitted his thesis from a tent.
five years of work, formatted correctly,
citations intact.
abstract written in the formal language
of a world that had stopped being formal
with him a long time ago.
somewhere far away,
in a room with good acoustics
and a water pitcher on the table,
a man in a suit spoke about sacrifice.
the cameras loved him for it.
he has never submitted anything from a tent.
he has never had to.
this is not a competition of suffering.
i know that.
grief is not a leaderboard
and pain does not need to be ranked
to be real.
but there is a specific kind of violence
in telling someone that the pen will save them
and then sending the missiles anyway.
it is the violence of a contract
honored by only one party.
of a child who did everything correctly,
who studied while hungry,
who cited sources in a city being erased,
who believed, because they were told to believe,
that effort had mass,
that discipline had weight,
that a well-argued conclusion
could outlast an airstrike.
free will is a beautiful idea.
it assumes your choices matter.
"it is hard as a youth to live in a
place where nothing is certain."
it assumes the playing field
is a field
and not a crater.
he finished the thesis anyway.
not because it changed the arithmetic of power.
not because the man in the suit would read it.
but because finishing it was the last room in the house
no one could take from him.
and he walked into it,
and he closed the door,
and he lived there
for as long as he could.
Maryam Farhan is a writer and technologist from Karachi, Pakistan. She writes poetry and prose at the intersection of place, body, and witness, and publishes on Substack under the name "Nothing New." This poem was written from a distance, by someone who could only watch, scroll, and witness, and felt that witness was the least she owed. She is part of a generation coming of age inside an archive of atrocities in real time, where history does not wait to be processed before the next thing begins. Writing is how she keeps up.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest