By Analise Braddock
9th grade | School of The Holy Child | New York
Finalist in the K–11 contest, Human Rights category
With lines from "How the World’s Deadliest Crises Go Unseen" by Amy Maxmen, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
“The world outside of Africa is barely aware.”
Awareness behaves like light,
falling where it is invited,
skimming past certain surfaces
without resistance.
Elsewhere, a different record is kept.
Not headlines, but absences.
A population of uncounted days,
of villages that thin at the edges,
of names that do not travel.
“How can we not know?”
Because knowledge requires passage.
Roads dissolve.
Signals fail.
Testimony remains where it is spoken.
And so the world constructs
a version of events
from what reaches it,
mistaking distance
for absence.
“Very few people appreciate how bad surveillance is.”
Visibility is not neutral.
It gathers around power,
around movement,
around the places already named.
Elsewhere, events proceed
without audience,
without amplification,
without correction.
Still, the structure holds.
People move through markets,
through fields,
through seasons that do not pause
to be recorded.
“In some remote villages, people are not hungry — they are starving.”
Even this arrives as language first,
flattened into a line,
waiting to be believed.
And beneath it,
a quieter question persists,
“Do we have blue blood and do others have red blood?”
Not a question of biology,
but of attention,
of which lives are rendered visible,
and which remain
perfectly real
without being seen.
gone in the sand and dust.
Analise Braddock is a rising sophomore at School of the Holy Child in Rye, New York. She enjoys swimming, writing, and reading. As a competitive swimmer, she spends much of her time training and challenging herself both in and out of the pool. She is especially interested in poetry and creative writing as a way to explore ideas and express different perspectives. In school, she enjoys studying history, literature, and languages. Analise is honored to have her work recognized in this contest and looks forward to continuing to develop her voice as a writer.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.