Art
Itzel DeLeón
By Mary Flaherty ('23)
Itzel De León, one of our very own comic creators for the Falcon, shares her journey and passion for creating art. Itzel explains that making art was not a skill she was born with, it was a skill she continued to improve and advance over time because it was something she enjoyed.
Itzel has received many awards for her art over the years. She received the Scholastic Regional Silver Award, the Knights of Columbus Award, and various other awards given through her school. Since coming to Incarnate Word Academy, Itzel’s passion for art has grown thanks to Mrs. Postel and her classmates. They pushed her to improve her skills and inspired her to work to her full capacity. Incarnate Word Academy has helped her by exposing her to art competitions and different opportunities for her to share her artwork.
Itzel’s favorite aspect of drawing and painting is the freedom to make her own pieces with different styles and techniques to really make the art her own. Itzel plans on keeping art with her throughout her life. She even wants to earn her tattoo license one day!
“It’s a blank canvas and you hold the ability to fill it.” - Itzel De León
Student Poetry Submissions
Once More, Tears
By Danielle Bartholet ('23)
“If I cry, don’t mind. I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”
No. It’s not okay. It is far from it. It is and will not be okay with me at all.
You spoke those words to me, and my heart cried alongside you.
I wanted your tears to be my own. Your pain shared and commingled with mine.
My hands across your cheeks, taking the tears, keeping them for my own, keeping them from hurting you.
My heart already carries a thousand knives.
What more can your tears do to me?
I wanted to scoop away whatever torments you, to take it out of your soul, take the hurt off your face, away from your red-rimmed eyes.
Once more, I feel the love I know has been in me, waiting for your return.
I’ll have to learn to hide that love once more.
I have to force my heart back into its cage, into its prison, its rigid bars forged from my bad timing, my hesitancy.
Is this already a lost cause? Is it improbable for me to want to love you?
Seeing you again, meeting your eyes, feeling my soul fill up, tells me that it is not so.
Then you were standing beside me.
You were, as you always have been, there to understand. To be a friend.
But is that all?
I don't know.
This coming time may tell, and these months might whisper to me the answers that for now lie in mist, shrouded in futures unknown.
My restraint has an expiration date.
A measured amount of time that I must present a false self to you, the kind of fake that eats at me night and day, the worst kind of façade I put up to protect you.
Loving you has made me a liar
Has turned me deliciously mad
Has made me hoard your tears. They are another stolen part of you that I keep
to pour out onto a page like this,
Tears again shed for the promise of what has already passed us by.