time
A Poem A Day #169: Retro
A Poem A Day #165: Future Me
A Poem A Day #164: The Falling Leaf
My Poem “The Gift of You”
Christmas is a time, Christmas is a season, Christmas is like a tide that slowly rises, overwhelms, and then recedes in the wake of a new year descending... Christmas is different every year for everyone who celebrates it. Christmas can be a different experience depending on how old someone is - when we are young Christmas is a series of magical moments, including: meeting someone dressed in a red suit with a white beard, making a list of things that we want, and receiving presents of all shapes and sizes; but, as we get older, as life goes on, and as we lose people who have always been special to us, Christmas can be a time of reflection, sadness, regret, and longing for what was and missing those who we have lost. Christmas can be a wonderful crossroads of feelings and emotions, of family, of friends, of making the most of what you have, of accepting what are you gifted, and of capturing the spirit of celebration that fills every street and the rooms of every house all around the world... Christmas is when love can be shown and shared... Christmas is when people have to think about others and truly show that they care... Christmas is about the build up to December the 25th - more so, perhaps, that the day itself... Christmas is sometimes more about following long established traditions - whether they are religious in nature, consumeristic, or of keeping alive the memory of people who to us will live on in our mind and in our heart and whose photos will remain long after we take down the festive cards we have received from their shelves. This Christmas, like every Christmas, we all hope for the best and wish to be blessed... this Christmas, like every Christmas, we all sometimes want what we can't have... this Christmas, like every Christmas, people listen to Christmas songs, people watch Christmas movies, and people don Christmas themed attire that they may have been waiting all year to wear every time they have got dressed... every Christmas it is important to make yourself happy, as well as make other people happy, because without thinking outloud and without expressing yourself then it wouldn't truly be Christmas - so give yourself a present, celebrate how you want, and perhaps reach out a hand to others and give them the gift of you this Christmas.
My Poem “Gone”
No matter how much you try to hold on to something sometimes you lose things, sometimes you lose people, sometimes you lose time; however, one day you unearth a piece of your past and you look at it for the first time in years, and, to your amazement, it does not not mean to you what it once meant - where before you would have done anything to not be parted from a particular thing, now, all the feelings that you once felt for something, you discover, seem to have evaporated, seem to have become lost, seem to have left without you knowing - and though, before, you might have told yourself that you could never live without that particular thing in your life, you come to find that time appears to have helped you more than you realize to get passed what might have been holding you back, because now you find it easy to walk away from what was never meant to be, because what once was is now gone.
My Poem “Mark”
Nothing stays pristine forever... no one stays the same way for all the days of their life... over time things wear out like old leather... no one stays untarnished - over time the power of the sun damages the outer skin of something or someone after a prolonged period of exposure. Everything is impacted by outside influences... everybody is marked by their time on Earth... everything has a journey from its creation to its destruction made up of events that came as a result of their encounter with outside forces... everybody has their own individual path through life and at several points everybody experiences moments of significance on par with a moment of rebirth. Life isn't a race... life isn't meant to be rushed... life isn't only about the world around us - because so much of what connects us lies above us in outer space... for some people life is like a rock that needs to be constantly admired and occasionally polished; but, to me, what makes life so special is that every day, upon every thing and everyone, another layer of character is added to what makes something and someone what they are - and some things and some people are meant to be, and they are meant to remain unrestored, tarnished, and imprinted with life's indellible marks.
My Poem “Forty”
Where did all the time go?
The last thing I knew I was
celebrating my thirtieth birthday,
and today I am celebrating
turning the big four-oh?
What a forty years it has been!
What a life I have lived!
When I look back I sometimes
cannot believe where I have been,
what I have done, nor who I have met
over the course of my life –
and because time goes by so fast
there are inevitably dreams that I have had
that feel like memories and there are memories
that I have made that sometimes feel like dreams.
It’s been forty years since I arrived
into this world that every day
never ceases to both surprise and inspire me…
it’s been forty years since I was
welcomed into this world with open arms
by my parents and by my family…
it’s been forty years since I first
saw another human being,
since I first smiled, since I first heard
the background music of nature
that never stops playing…
it’s been forty years since the light
of the sun bestowed upon me
the sight of miracles that will always be with me
and will continue to keep my heart beating.
I remember exactly where I was,
what I was doing, and what I was thinking
ten years ago, when I turned thirty –
and when I think back to those simpler times
I cannot believe what the last ten years
especially have given to me:
the gift of inspiration, the gift of poetry,
the gift of perpetual love,
the gift of looking above to the stars
of the night and to the bright blue
of the daytime sky, and the realisation
that life is an adventure that needs
to be lived to be fully understood.
I know who I am, I know what I am,
and I know who and what in this world
mean the most to me –
so, today, as I turn forty,
if I had to choose one word
to describe myself or my life,
I would undoubtedly have to say: Lucky –
because over the last forty years
I have been given a life filled with
moments that are the stuff of pure poetry.
My Poem “Overlap”
Every day overlaps with the last…
every day everybody’s thoughts
overlap with their memories of the past…
every day people realize that there
are things that are harder to distance
themselves from because of the tangle
of lose threads that continue to dangle
from the fray of where we have been…
every day the stories of people
far and wide become connected
to one another as if by fate
in ways that can sometimes feel like a dream…
every day in this world people from
the past, the present, and the future
meet and metaphysically shake hands,
because some things, like music,
cross time and space and find
mutual friends who they feel understand them…
every day everybody wades deep
into the ocean of life and consciousness –
especially while they are asleep,
and everybody can find themselves
stuck in a whirlpool from which
it can be hard to break free…
every day as we get older
every day feels like it is here, there,
and then gone again in a flash…
every day is new and unique –
however, more often than not,
the events of yesterday, today,
and tomorrow will always
find a way to invariably overlap.
My Poem “The Tough Stuff”
When people are surrounded
by artificial light, by heat, and by order
it can be hard to imagine what it was like
for the first generation of human explorers,
who originally began as one diverse group,
who then went their separate ways
to discover and to understand more
about what and who makes the world
the way that it is, as well as populate
the vastly different regions that
our planet is known for the have to be
adapted to living in in many different ways.
The first people didn’t have clothes…
the first people didn’t have maps…
the first people didn’t even have
wooden built houses to call homes…
the first people didn’t even have maths –
but what the first people had,
and what sustained them,
were dreams, inspiration, ideas,
and from the moment that they harnessed
to ability to willingly create fire
they gave themselves the gift to be able
to see and to travel during the night,
to cook their own meals, and to be entranced
by the dancing flames of glowing light.
The first men and women who
embarked upon their journey of fate
to go to places they knew not where
saw things that they could only
conceptualise by capturing their depictions
of them in cave paintings and in legends
that have endured for thousands of years.
The first of us were the first to feel the spark of love…
they were the first of us to feel the passion of life…
they were the first of us to look up at the sky
and wonder about our place in the cosmos,
surrounded by an infinite number of stars,
and question why any of us are here…
they were the first of us to be brave enough
to bring people together to create
entire civilizations who thrived for a time
and who had to go through
more than anybody alive today could ever imagine.
We who are alive today are
who we are, with what we have,
because our ancestors were more
than even they knew that they were at the time –
but one thing that our ancestors knew well
was that in life what everybody
and what everything sometimes needs
more than anything is each other,
and also the knowledge that by
working together anybody can
get through anything, even the tough stuff.
markthepoet.me 