A long, sleepless night:
My mind wanders far away
In search of answers
Another shooting
More death, violence,
And tears:
Will it ever end?
Life, love, death,
A never-ending cycle –
Is this truly
All there is?
Good and evil
There is no such thing:
We all hide monsters
In our hearts
The clock strikes midnight
Shadows spread across the walls:
Time waits for no one
Silence surrounds me,
An ocean of
Nothingness
I cannot escape
My heart aches –
I loved her more
Than words can say
But it was not enough
Moving on
Is a long and winding road:
I must find
My own way home
A warm summer breeze
Whispering through the treetops
Like a lover’s sigh
Another Christmas
Bright lights shining
On the tree:
It is not the same
Morning:
Haze hangs in the air
While music drifts
From somewhere far away
In the distance
A yellow sun
Begins to rise:
At last I find rest
Birds sing in the trees
Children laugh and play outside:
Life goes on once more
I’ve been working on this poem for a few days and finished it while I was still awake early this morning. I’ve been feeling quite down the closer it’s got to Christmas; I guess I’ve had a lot on my mind after an eventful year and writing this poem has helped me to sort through a lot of what I’ve been feeling, as well as trying to make sense of the terrible events in Connecticut from earlier this week as well.
The poem is inspired by a lot of things – the shooting in Connecticut, the end of a recent relationship, my grandmother dying – but it’s primarily meant as a collection of thoughts and feelings, the kind of thoughts that enter your mind in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep and your mind just wanders. In that way it’s also a bit of a companion piece to another poem I wrote, The Sound of Midnight, which explored the same idea at a different point in my life.
The photo is a photo I took of a crescent moon last year. I haven’t taken many photos of the moon as it’s one of the more difficult subjects to capture as it’s so bright and you need a very long lens to capture it properly. This was actually the first shot I took… not too bad for a first try. I’ll have to take some more at some stage now that I know what to do!
Photo © CJ Levinson 2011-12
Poem licenced under Creative Commons
