Lessons with Unspoken Questions
Jessie Yi
I lay witness to the ones that use busyness
As the excuse that “it’s not my business”
But the pages, projects, and performance
Never really pause
Because we perpetually drown by the work
We wanted
To keep us awake, but wealthy.
But when will a time come when the riches we seek
Are not what makes the poor impoverished
But what makes the humble man happy?
Because “what is essential is invisible to the eyes”
And to seek with our eyes
Will only garner a materialistic prize.
We’re no different to this indifference,
We add, multiply, and divide with our eyes
And subtract
Until we find those differences between our features
And let it become our teachers, our past, our futures
Then we are the preachers that screech and squawk
A cacophony of creatures, all claiming to be human.
Professor, will you tell me?
Who are our enemies?
Why do we fear our foes
Before we ask of their woes?
Professor, I just want to know,
Will the happiness of humans
Hide behind heaven’s walls
That we raise for warfare and the weary?
Or behind hell’s trenches
That we dig for duty and the dead?
Professor, what can we do
So that the arms that we use
To survive, save, and support
Do not become arms armed
With the benign discoveries designed by doctors
Signed to be devices of destruction?
I sit in the bleachers,
Beyond the back of the bus
And guilt grasps me as the ghosts
Of people’s presence pressed upon their phones
Makes me reflect of my own.
Professor, how do we explain to the young
That yesterday is not the past
But our present that we must patch, and put right?
How do we unlearn the unawareness,
Un-assume our understanding,
And learn to lose, labor to live, and love Unconditionally?
Jessie Yi is in the class of 2026, and is from Ridgewood, NJ. She’s pursuing a bachelor’s degree in cell biology and neuroscience and a minor in psychology. She writes, “I love pondering the unanswered questions in my mind just as much as I like asking/talking about them; I wrote this piece thinking of our education system: the questions I feel are at the foundations of education and what we seek to learn. I’m deeply interested in how the world connects in so many ways–philosophy, history, science, the arts–and how all individuals and beings are one but also idiosyncratic and valuable in their own ways, if only we are brave enough to ask questions and understand a little deeper.”
Jessie wrote this poem in a course taught by Lindsay Haber, who selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.