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My Poem ‘Soul of the Summer’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Summer is the season of the sun;
summer is the time when everything can shine;
summer is sometimes different
in different places around the world,
it depends where you are from;
summer is when all life can flourish
and share its colours far and wide;
summer brings about new experiences,
new music, new inspirations,
re-invigoration of soul and spirit,
and it is when anyone and everyone
can get out and enjoy the beauty of the world
and see the face of nature close-up,
and if and when you can
to have a good time.

The sunlight of a summer morning,
the heat of the summer air,
the vibe of a summer spent walking,
talking, recalling, and memory making;
the incomparable and intense summer glare;
the constant mood medicine on the summer breeze
that keeps you smiling;
the summer sensation that you feel
when your skin changes colour;
the summer days spent rocking
from side to side in a hammock
that feels like you are lying calmly on a cloud
as you spend hours just relaxing.

Every summer is unique;
you can capture important moments
in photographs, memories, impressions –
but you can’t every capture everything;
every summer has its valleys and its peaks;
you can often recall a particular summer
by recalling the songs that were constantly playing
on the radio that everybody was singing;
every summer is revealing,
and it is a time to say and to do
absolutely anything.

Sneakers, sandals, tennis shoes, flip-flops;
shorts, skirts, t-shirts, low-cut tops;
shades, sunglasses, baseball caps;
sun-screen, jackets, thirst-quenching drinks on-tap.

The message of the summer in which you find yourself
is always to allow things to be see, and to feel free;
the golden season is when you can seek out and enjoy
all that the world has to offer;
the meaning of every season
is to make the most of the gift of life’s beauty;
hope is meant to rush through the bloodstream of everybody,
and finding hope in something that makes you happy
is what it means to have found the soul of the summer.

My Poem ‘The Beach’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It has been a beautiful day;
it has been a day to remember
in so many ways;
the sparkling and the warm sand
beneath my feet that I am sitting on
feels amazing;
the glistening golden sea
that looks as if it could be
the surface of the sun –
because it looks in every way
like an ocean of pure energy –
is breathtaking;
as I look out and I see
the most beautiful and unbroken blue sky,
my heart skips a beat;
as I close my eyes,
I am transported in my mind
to a deserted island,
surrounded by palm trees –
in my imagination, I am a castaway
living a life free to be
whomever I want to be –
I have no worries,
I have no distractions,
I am self-sustaining
and I live off and alongside nature
and every day I walk my island paradise
and I swim in the beautiful blue sea;
I read the books that I brought with me,
and I daily write down what I see –
what I think about and what I feel
about life in my journal and diary;
I listen to the sound of the waves
and each one is like the voice of an old friend
stopping by to say ‘hello’;
I hear the music of my youth
playing from out of nowhere;
and when I think about the outside world,
and about my friends and family living their lives
far away, their faces appear
as if sculpted by the billion of grains
of sand that I see below me.

My hair is long;
my beard is substantial;
my skin is brown;
my home is a hand-built house
of cut down trees that has a roof of green
and hard-wearing leaves;
from my favourite spot,
looking out at my favourite view,
I have seen unimaginable sights:
dolphins, turtles, whales;
just off the coast, below the waves,
there is the most stunning
and beautiful coral reef.

To me, this place is heaven;
to me, this life could not be anymore perfect;
to me there is nowhere else in the entire world
where you could see the sun rise and the sun set,
and lay down on your back and see
a 360-degree view of the Milky-way galaxy’s
infinite and magnificent stars
shining their incredible and magical light,
in a place that is in every way
the definition of idyllic.

In my daydream, I look to the oncoming waves
and I see something bobbing up and down
before being washed up on the beach in front of me
and within touching distance of the toes of my feet;
I am not phased by the sight of the plastic bottle
and the evident message on a piece of paper
that is contained within –
however, when I reach down for the bottle
and I unscrew the lid and I reach in
and pull out the piece of paper,
it takes me awhile to realize
the messages’ meaning
because of how profound
the four-words of it are,
it takes a while to sink in.

I am brought back to reality in a flash!
As I look at the world, and to the sea,
everything looks even more stunning
and beautiful than it had appeared before.
Still with the message from my daydream
echoing in my mind like a bell,
I decide to write the same message
in pen on a torn-out page
from my nearby journal…
I write the same message
in the same way as it had appeared to me
only seconds before in my imagination,
and then I put the message
in an empty bottle of water
that I had brought with me earlier,
I stand up,
I run towards the ocean
and I throw my message in a bottle out
as far as I can
for someone to find in the future,
for someone to discover and read;
and then I sit back down
and I watch the sea again,
and I am again taken away
to a far-away place –
all the while, I am sitting in the sun
on the sand of this gorgeous beach.

My Poem ‘Birthmark’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

34 years, 408 months,
1,774 weeks, 12,418 days ago,
on the 21st of April, 1981,
a little boy was born
and two of the most wonderful
and amazing parents
anyone could ask for
were blessed with a son –
that was the day
that I arrived in the world,
and that was when the tapestry of my life
slowly began to unfurl.

Mark James Hastings,
that is the name that I was given at birth
and that is who I have been
since it was printed for all time
on my birth certificate;
son, brother, friend,
wanderer, wonderer,
dreamer, hard-worker,
and 99.9 percent of the time
a lover of life and a writer
in the form of a poet.

People are always telling me
that I don’t look my age;
people are always asking me
what my secret is to having
an old soul inside someone
with such a young face;
people ask me all the time
where I get my ideas from
when I am writing,
and my response to that question
is one word: life –
because that is the epic adventure
that is eternally and limitlessly
exciting, enlightening, and inspiring.

I have flashes of memories of my childhood
that regularly come back to me;
I have emotions of experiences from my life
that daily make me smile and make me cry;
I have mental and physical photos
that I look at with glee;
I have questions that I ask
that begin who…? what…? where…?
when…? how…? why…?
But I will always know and remember
what is important and I will continue
to spread the word about what I have learned
in my life, and sometimes I secretly wish
that I could replay certain special moments
that I have had, even though I know
life is meant to be so that I can’t.

Today is my birthday;
today is a day that is close to my heart;
today is a day when I have so much to say;
today is always the day when I think back
and I talk to my younger self,
and even at the moment that I am born
I visualize myself in the mind
of my infant-self and I leave myself
a message and a question that has no end
that I know I will carry my whole life –
like a defining and indelible birthmark.

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My Poem ‘Live Long and Prosper’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

While growing up we all have heroes
who we see, who we watch, who we listen to,
and who we want to emulate,
and while growing up
there were no greater heroes or role-models
who used to keep me captivated, interested,
in-awe, and excited,
to follow their continuing adventures,
where no man has gone before,
than the crew of the Starship Enterprise –
and when I got home from school,
it was to the final frontier where I journeyed off to
on my television and in my imagination –
and to this day every episode and story of every series
of my favourite universe, canon, fan-base, and franchise,
never fails to fill me with the same feelings
I had as a boy imagining being a member of the Enterprise’s crew –
and every time I watch an episode or a movie now,
I am, and I will forever be, captivated.

Captain James T. Kirk, the commander of the ‘Enterprise’
in the Original Series of ‘Star Trek’ in the sixties,
was a natural leading man, and a hero that
wherever he would go thousands would follow –
because William Shatner played him so expertly and perfectly,
no one else could truly be or inhabit such a role
as he did in ‘Jim’ Kirk;
however, it was always ‘Mr. Spock’, played timelessly
by the late great Leonard Nimoy,
who I used to to be more drawn to and fascinated by –
and like another fictional hero of mine, Sherlock Holmes,
Spock used knowledge and logic to be the source
and the answer to most of the problems
he and the rest of the Enterprise crew came face to face with –
and Leonard Nimoy was Spock in every way, shape, and form,
and the knowledge now that Mr. Spock and Leonard Nimoy’s light
has gone out from the world is a loss to everyone on Earth.

Leonard Nimoy, and Mr. Spock, leave a legacy
in so many ways infinite ways for everybody to see,
remember, and be inspired by.
I have always been a life-long Star Trek fan,
and every time I hear that someone from my favourite TV show
has died, I honestly do want to cry.
I just wish I had had the chance to meet Leonard Nimoy;
I just wish I could have been able to tell him
how influential he was to so many people, and always will be,
and to tell him how important he and his message
was to me as a boy.

I will always be inspired to reach for the stars;
I will always look back on my childhood with a smile on my face,
and remember my favourite half-Human/half-Vulcan fondly,
because to me his spirit will forever loom large.
I will never stop watching, reading, imagining,
and I will all my life be inspired by the voyages
of every crew and every starship, especially the Enterprise,
travelling and exploring the final frontier;
I will always remember the amazing Leonard Nimoy,
and this poem is my lasting tribute to him.
And as Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek character Mr. Spock
was frequently fond of saying, in his name:
I promise to live long and prosper.

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My Poem ‘Fortune Cookie’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It is amazing how motivating a single word can be;
it is phenomenal seeing how powerful a message can resonate;
it is a thing of beauty to see someone reciprocating
the meaning of a single line of poetry;
it is unbelievable how much love a single poem can create.

People are like an onion of infinite layers;
life is like a game with an infinite number of players;
people have a sometimes untapped infinite capacity for adaptability;
life is a balance of bliss and tragedy.

We are all fascinated by the future
and about what has not yet happened;
we are all hopeful that life will work out the way we want it to;
we are all an influence on a friend;
we are all in need of something or someone
to hint, guide, help, and give us a realization about something
that we might want to do.

It would be helpful to have a crystal ball
to gaze into every morning to see what the day has in store;
it would be brilliant if you could tune in to a channel
on your television or radio, and replay everything you saw,
said, and heard, from the day before;
it would be a dream come true to read your future in a newspaper,
and see all the things that you have to look forward to;
it would be god-like and something omniscient
to be able to look into someone’s eyes, and read their mind,
and know instantly what someone is thinking about you.

I believe that there are subtle, sometimes blatant,
signs and messages from the universe,
and from the future, flashing right in front of us,
saying: ‘look here’, or ‘this way’;
I believe that when you find your groove and your way
things will fall into place and make sense,
and you will be set for life,
if you are curious, attentive, and lucky;
I believe that something that feels natural can never go away;
I believe that everything is intentional,
and I also believe that you should take notice and think a lot
about what and who speaks to you –
even if that message comes in the form of a fortune
that you find when you break open a fortune cookie.