Creative Column – May 22nd

I would like to include one of my own poems this week entitled ‘Voyager in the Darkness’. I wrote it a few years ago, but I find myself coming back to it because it always seems to resonate at different points in my life. Navigating your early twenties really can feel like being a ‘voyager in the darkness’. You’re trying to figure out and make sense of a world that is constantly changing. Things that once seemed so clear become blurred, ideas that you were certain on become riddled with doubt.  

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As a songwriter, poetry is something I’ve always loved to engage in. That’s what really prompted me to start the creative corner. Poetry is one of the oldest forms of artistic human expression. It’s much older than the novel which only dates back about a thousand years. Some of our oldest most influential stories such as the Iliad or the Odyssey by Homer, were told in verse, not prose.  

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People always wonder what it is that distinguishes us from animals. Cruelty? Compassion? Intelligence?  

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I think the only thing that truly differentiates us from other animals is our ability to tell stories. They are the essence of what it means to be human. The fabric of our society is built on storytelling. We tell stories on dates, at dinner parties, during work morning teas. Life’s most significant landmarks, whether they are weddings or funerals – are celebrated and mourned through stories.  

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Poetry is one of the oldest forms of storytelling and one of the most important. It grants us permission to express things in ways that grammatical rules and conventional sentence structure may not allow.  

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Poet’s Corner

Voyager in the Darkness

The sun that timidly kissed the ambivalent glass in the afternoon,

The baby-faced moon that haunted the ripples of water in the evening,

A journey of joy, stress and laughter,

Whose beauty is burdened by a tinge of sadness,

At the knowledge it signifies the end of a grand chapter,

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Prepared yet apprehensive,

Excited yet terrified,  

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A melancholic spirit,  

The seconds that move into hours and then days,

Days that will mark the end and beginning of everything,

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A plunge into the violent abyss,

Letting nature carve its path,

The apathetic endless sea,

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Into the night,  

The land of new on the horizon,

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