Poetry #1: Siege of the Starry Sky
Overwhelming beauty in a cruel world
Hi all!
I’m trying out something for the first time, and that something is poetry.
To be honest, until recently, I never really “got” poetry. A poem was mostly just: sentences with bad grammar, song without the music, and required reading from high school.
That is not to say I did not appreciate good poems. Heck, some poems have even moved me to tears. But I could not comprehend why anyone would ever write them. That is, until a year ago.
I saw the Milky Way ring during a trip to Canada, and something shifted in me. I felt the urge to write something, but not an essay or prose. Sentences felt too structured. So I tried out writing a poem. It felt much more natural and the entire poem just flowed out of me in a few minutes. That poem is the one that appears in this post.
Then just two weeks ago, I went to SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and was really captivated by some of the art pieces there. The next morning, I had a similar feeling as when I saw the Milky Way ring. Another poem just “wrote itself” through me. (I will publish that poem in another post)
So here I present to you: The Siege of the Starry Sky.
The Siege of the Starry Sky
And the youth said Living such a short span, we are all almost dead Brought into this world without my permission I did not ask to be born What is even the point? Life is but a tribulation. Nature isn’t beautiful; it is cruel It is the survival of fittest and destruction of the weak Society isn’t much better; it is a culling of the meek And gentle Only the strong, mighty, and glib may rule But then I saw a starry sky far from civilization For the first time, saw not just a handful of stars But thousands upon thousands And the Milky Way ring I began to weep uncontrollably My hatred of the world was a wall I had built up But that starry night mounted a siege An onslaught that the walls could not withstand The walls crumbled And I fell in love with the world Just a little bit.