Experiencing Life
Set the field to till. Live off the land. Let the world sustain you as it wills.
Overhead the land sleeps peacefully. The jewels of its own creation.
History once set in stone lives on once more. Relive the past.
Hold it all in one bold eye.
For fury comes at any time, striking from the heavens.
Live it all with the happiness of glass, let a smile cross your face.
Let loose the arrows to the one who would forsake it.
Fight for what you hold dear, whatever it may be.
But know our civilisation is one made by us. The world’s invaders.
Plastic and statuesque, fake and unreal.
And long is the climb back up to the summit.
For all things will join together, all roads must intersect.
Look at the world we built harsh upon the landscape.
Collecting life as we destroyed it. Trophies of our war.
Underneath the surface they slowly move as one. A pack to the slaughter.
Cradling the fallen as we once had done as well.
Soon they shall be freed, cast aflutter in the wind.
While we slowly limp towards a jaded future that we cannot discern.
I know that, when it comes to poetry, there’s a certain amount of leaving the interpretation and meaning of the piece up to the reader. So, for any other poetry pieces I do, I’ll try to leave it unexplained unless someone asks. But for this, it comes from an interesting activity, so I figured I’d explain it so anyone else can give it a go if they want. During a university seminar, in a way of showing us (the six of us in class that week) that poetry didn’t have to be deep and meaningful, our teacher read a piece that was quite random and stilted at times. We would try and explain what we thought it was about, and then he told us that the writer of the piece explained that it was just done by looking at pictures in a book and writing down the first thing he thought of. So, that’s what we did. We had 18 images in total (one line for each image, if you notice), everyone with the same images, and had 6 seconds with each image to look at it and write down what you thought of before it was passed to the next person. That was then repeated until you got back to the image that you started on. So, as you’d imagine, most of the pieces were quite jumpy and didn’t seem to relate, which was kind of the point of the exercise. Less a focus on linking it together and more just getting something down. However, being the storyteller and fast writer that I am, I managed to make much more of a connected piece.