Junior Nidhin Madhu didn’t expect to win anything after he submitted a French poem in February about a chocolate lizard to an UNESCO sponsored international poetry competition. But a few months later, he got an email from the organization with the results and was shocked to find his name on the chart of winners.

“Honestly, I’m not the best at French, I’ll tell you that much. I struggle with French so it was kind of surprising to me that I did win,” Madhu said. “But it’s not as much about the French behind it. It’s more about the idea behind it and the underlying cause that I’m trying to raise awareness of through my poem.”

Madhu wrote the poem for an assignment for his French 4 Honors class. French teacher Sarah Finck had her students choose between two assignments: one about where you would write about traveling with a time machine and another about the environment, and submitted all her students’ poems to the competitions. She first found out about Madhu’s victory when he came to class asking about it.

“I submitted all the poems that my students wrote on the environment not knowing what would come of it,” Finck said, “and then I actually had checked the website of the sponsor to see if there were any winners I couldn’t quite find, and then he got the email.”

When Madhu first took on the project in February, he found the prompt rather broad. After reading an article on global warming, he decided that that would be his specific topic of choice. Eventually, his idea developed into one about a chocolate lizard that shed its tinfoil skin, polluting the environment. This idea spawned from reading poems in French and English in French 4 Honors and noticing their connection to animals.

“Most of the poems we read were somewhat childish and had a lot of these animals and fictional characters like most poems, even in English poetry,” Madhu said. “A lot of famous poetry has this childish nature to it as well as this inner depth that tells this underlying story about something bigger that’s happening in the world.”

Madhu was one of two winners from the U.S. and was invited to Paris for a special festival for all the winners. However, since the ceremony fell on May 20 and was in Paris, he was unable to attend. However, his poem was displayed proudly at the Earth Deconstructed event at the French classes’ booth.

In the future, Madhu intends to continue writing poetry for fun as it has always been something he has enjoyed doing.

“Poetry is always something I’ve done for fun ever since middle school … This one happened to be in French and it entered in a French competition so somehow I won,” Madhu said. “So writing poetry … will always be some part of my life. I like doing it for fun every once in a while. It’s a philosophical side of me.”