When I hear an idea that strikes me and gets my mind turning I hold onto it. If that thought comes back to me repeatedly in the following few days, I write it down and keep writing about it until it feels done.
Most of my poetry takes the above path of creation. Tonight I wrote a poem based on a quote from Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“Maybe if we felt any loss as keenly as we felt the death of one close to us, human history would be a lot less bloody.” ~ William Riker
I wrote this poem in correspondence with that quote:
We barely flinch for dead bodies.
We mourn the losses of what we see is ours
Our nation,
but only in large numbers that we can’t distinguish ourselves from
our city,
because the people across that line in the ground
like different teams
Our schools
because we are taught more truth
Our Colors,
because novelty
is a virus
Our spirituality
because our peace is so much purer
While we dissect ourselves into identity groups
No one mourns
as the blood of an entire species spills red
In the history of time,
we proceed into memory,
as nothing but bones of possibility
The stain of humanity
has left little reason
for the future to mourn
a fear so virulent it embodied us
when to our death, we misinterpreted
the warning of caution, for that of danger.
SickyBeat 