Damp Ashes-Poem

I am the silent water of the eyes

Falling another drop as another dream dies

Drop by drop, I will become a river

And alone in the night, you will shiver

As you feel me crashing against your stone heart

Hard as it is, it will surely break apart

You will weep so bitterly alone

Wondering how water could possibly crack stone

You will simply watch every time the river will crash

Reducing your stone heart to nothing but ash

By then you will feel as if you’ve drowned

Unaware that you’ve actually been crowned

From these very ashes you will rise

As this salty water dries

You will leave the world mesmerized

Once they’ve realized

That you, my dear are a Phoenix,

A creature strengthened by its critics

 

This poem was inspired from one of the river walks, the one where we were supposed to pick a person to watch through the eyes of a writer. The women I picked was a guitarist who was sitting on the patio singing in a beautiful voice. One of the lyrics that caught my ear and eventually my interest was, “Phoenix in the Water.” As a writer, I could go in countless directions with these few words, so I chose to write a poem.  Basically the poem is about a strong and tough individual that seems unbreakable. This is what the stone heart symbolizes; a sturdy individual. The water in this poem is symbolic of outside hate and pressure. The fact that it starts out as a silent tear drop and becomes a roaring river that is able to break something as hard as rock is reflective of the idea that it does not simply take one mean comment or one act of bullying to hurt someone but, rather the consistency of these horrible things that make strong individuals with potential fall apart and break.  The idea that a beautiful and majestic bird, a Phoenix rises from a pitiful pile of ash is symbolic of the idea that the best things and the best people have seen and experienced the hardest things. So, in a nutshell this poem is about someone who has gone through a tough time only to come out stronger and better.  You could essentially take away two things from this poem. The first is that with consistency an individual can accomplish anything (positive or negative) and the second is that our hardships mold us into better and stronger beings than we were before.

 

 

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