Are We Missing Anything?
Here we are in our phases, Lord:
the aspiring, the accomplished, the aging,
the tired, and, of course, the dying.
We observe one another from our current stages,
but do any of us ever apprehend what’s really there?
The playful boy nets a brilliant butterfly
but accedes to adult authority.
Can he perceive the child within the man
who persuades him to set it free?
The adroit woman addresses her daughter’s curiosity
over how she came to be, but can the elder one
recall the innocence of her puerile mentality?
The busy businessman regards his failing mother dear
but deems her needs too bothersome to keep her very near.
Does he not see, as does she, the lameness of his excuses?
The dying man rolls back his eyes to meet the world beyond.
Does the life he lived until his death show any signs of sight?
Lord, what becomes of our blindness when our phases are all done?
Foremost, you get an A for subject matter. The philosophical questions of this poem are as deep as they are unanswerable... and yet, I'd like to try and answer you to a degree... even though my answer can never suffice. I think the nature... the raw purpose of all being is in experience. We exist to bring experience back to God. To the all forgiving supreme, I do not think our actions are perceived so harshly. I think there's a lot of wiggle room, and I think if we screw up, we get to try again.
ReplyDeleteNow for the poem: I think the musing nature of the poem hurts it linguistically. I also don't think there's anything you can really do about it. It seems hard to insert heightened language into these sentences as they stand, because the ideas are so concrete you risk skewing them with muddled verbage. My advice is to try another draft, conform to a similar ideological structure, yet provide a form which is more complementary to higher specificity. I hope that makes sense.