America The Beautiful
Diya S.
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These two poems are meant to explore the distortion of American patriotism and politics. This Land Is Your Land is a critique of superficial patriotism, which serves as a veneer for nationalism. True American virtue lies in independent thought—something we, as a country, have long abandoned—now attempting to make up for this sad reality with a misplaced superiority complex. In The Recipe for a Nation, I want to convey that it is our own apathy that often prolongs cycles of violence and warfare. Before writing this poem, I remembered a conversation I had with my dad in the car, where he said that he had completely lost faith in the news because of this reason. I’m not advocating for complete abstinence from the news, but I do want the audience to continue empathizing with conflicts that might no longer be front-page headlines but are still very real.
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To me, creativity is a way to turn uncomfortable truths into important conversations. It means having the ability to dissect and challenge narratives and express ideas that are uniquely your own in a way that is uniquely yours.
