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Six Billion Others
[For children of Middle School age]
What is true and what is false?
Does the past exist or not?
Can you say the sky is blue?
That anything you've said, you knew?
Is there a God?
If so, who is he?
Is he one? is he ten?
or infinity?
Are we God?
After dying
our souls are dead?
Or simply quiet?
Or have they left?
Are there heavens beyond our coil?
Sinners damned to hell do boil?
Do our souls ever recur?
Or do our elements converge?
Are we dead... forever?
Is this life we live important?
Is it but a transient portal?
Is purpose immanent to life?
Or are we drifting, leafs in flight?
What is love?
Does it exist?
Are humans good
Or evil cists?
Are we blank?
What is beauty and what is art?
Is there value in our thoughts?
Is there any truth in seeing?
Is beauty its own excuse for being?
Do you think some things immoral?
Are there any truths immortal?
Are we guards of our futility?
Is it mad to see life differently?
These are questions to consider
The common, human, eternal riddle.
Take heart when you've felt the pain
That six billion others feel the same.
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Thanks for the comments. Reader approval always makes me want to post more stuff. Ironically, that would bring less reader approval.
I modeled this poem after the progression of thought in a human life. The first stanza concerns the first eking thoughts of an infant becoming sentient. "What is this blur of events around me? Is this real?" After object permanence, the questions grow more and more complex, and less and less personal. The two penultimate stanzas represent the highest forms of philosophy I've currently reached [Is there morality? Is the universe nihilistic? Is there really such a thing as madness?]. Maybe I'll add more later in life. For now, it is merely a roadmap for those who come after.
I must say this is the work I'm most proud of on EditRed. It may not be my best writing. But I feel it summarizes, in just over two hundred words, the scope of something as huge and daunting as human philosophy. |
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I used to watch the rain run tracks down the car window on Sunday afternoons, when my parents and I were returning from the daily grocery shop - which I did love because I always bought the same kind of pink strawberry lollipop and the same sort of cheap comic book that I stashed away in my many clumsy handmade notebooks - and I wondered, I wondered about life (and the conception of time -- when you're really small, you don't give a damn about "in ten minutes" or "tomorrow" or "later", you just want to pop your thumb into your mouth and hear "NOW! NOW!") and questions.
So many questions.
I loved this, absolutely loved this, because I was seven then, and I'm thirteen now, and this piece sums up all the questions I ask myself when I sit in the back seat on the dazed Sunday afternoons (hoping for a rainbow) and I know that I'll keep asking them until the day I die, or find the answers, whichever comes first.
Also loved your title - the conception of the immense population of this world (the cultures, the faces, the smiles, the passing of lives and routines and struggles and little victories that piece together our humanity) staggers me.
Used the - very selfish - word "I" in this comment a lot ... but this poem was really something.
Better stop writing an essay though. Keep up the good work and thank you for the thought provoking read. You know what i gotta do now, donthcha? Mmmhmm?
To the BOOKSHELF ! |
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I can almost hear the molten thought pouring into this poem. These questions are common, and human. I just hope they are not eternal. I would very much like to see the answers.
Did you deliberately keep the word "question" singular in the last stanza? Though most English teachers would argue that you need to change that, I think it embodies the singlularity of the constant Question in the human mind. It seems like one of the small hints that poets like Eliot and Hughes would sneak in. |
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I think if kids in middle school thought about all these things a little more regularly, Denny's would be making a lot more money from younger kids.
And hopefully they'd grow up a little bit more intellectually inclined.
I think about these things all the time. I guess that's what a writers real job is, though, isn't it? Good piece. |
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