Heartburn

• Scout Simpson-Purdon, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2021

Sometimes I feel like I’m spinning around.
Off balanced body, tilting ground.
I try to talk, but the dirt of the silenced fills my mouth,
Aching in my throat, strangling sound

I see people moving and talking and speaking,
but the sound of them all? It’s blocked out by the creaking.
The cracks of this earth are widening behold,
The weight of it all will swallow me whole.

I feel like I’ve been betrayed.
These people of generations before generations have stayed,
And left this world dirty, dying and frayed.

Sometimes I feel like the earth is moving,
rippling in waves of emotion and pooling in puddles at my feet that I can’t get out of,
yet the earth continues to spin so I can’t be found,
Off balanced body muted sound.
The earth, my heart, the refusals to learn, I fight for my future as I hold my heartburn

These curtains of heat that are folding the world,
Icebergs melting,
Water heating,
Animals dying,
And humans eating,
Because isn’t that what it is?

That’s what it’s about, the earth giving and people living and lying and killing,
For the sick green greed that surrounds their hearts, they’ll twist and pull until it rips apart.

Sometimes I feel like I’m breathing through a straw,
A plastic straw that will cause so much gore,
Of Course I have it better, here where I live, these people across oceans are still struggling to swim.

Society has spun the web of deceit, like a spider, bad people are waiting to eat.
Because isn’t that what it is?
Money.
And Oil.
And Plastic
And foil.

“We are doing everything we can”
“By 2060 we will start to act!”
For years, you’ve bought us with that crap.

And how can we change? If people continue to mess,
“oh yes we’ll act, but just.. let us rest”

Our plastic cities feed plastic fish,
then serve them up on a plastic dish.
For too long the system has continued to turn,
but as it does the anger churns.

How much longer can we keep denying?
This is real, this is happening, so why do you keep lying?

I haven’t lived here long. But I hope I have many years,
why should I fear the future you’ve reared?

There are 4,000 planets we have discovered.
Years and years of monetary investment have run.
And how many planets can we inhabit?
Only 1.



And for years and years, we have been chilling it,
for years and years, we have been grilling it.
The climate has spiked like the heartlines of the dying,
And the earth has suffered for it,
And only the Animals hear it crying.



Only when the last of the bees have fallen,
the birds have died and been gutted of the plastic they ate,
Only when the rainforests have been destroyed and there is no fish left to bait, only when the oil and the fumes have suffocated the air,
it seems only then, will you begin to care.