Karen at Keeping Secrets is driving the bus this week, and it's a school bus! Her prompt, aptly enough, is to write a poem about school or schooling. I give you a poem I wrote when I was in the 10th grade. I tweeked it a little just now (I was going on memory, anyway), but for the most part it is true to the words, and certainly to the thoughts, of the high schooler who wrote it many years ago.
My heart longs greatly
For a love long lost in time,
A love I searched for
Too strongly ever to find,
A love sadly lost for aye.
The love I needed
Lay before unseeing eyes,
For the blinders of
My fantasies and desires
Hid your eager heart from me.
So I live without
The love I did not notice,
The hope you carried,
The gift you wished to give me,
A love sadly lost for aye.
12 comments:
Well this captures the drama of high school perfectly. So many crushes & so much unrequited love - & we so often missed what was right in front of us.
Frankly, though, I'm glad you were oblivious - because it made you free for me :)
Oh, the angst! Very nicely and simply expressed though. We have such high-fallutin' ideas about love and life when we're young, don't we?
A wonderfully idealistic poem, one that sweeps the reader into strong emotions. As Wilde said, youth and beauty are the only things worth having.
This captures high school longing perfectly. The angst, the isolation, the fantasyland...
wonderful job!
Your teenage feelings were universal and your 10th grade writing expressed them so personally.
Dear C.L.,
I do remember how strongly feelings hit at that time, how completely they seemed to take over.
I don't think that growing older makes feelings less, but they are also not quite so much like fire on the skin. We scar and endure.
Thanks for the memory. Thank goodness none of those wishes I had back then came true, too!
Ann T.
Teenage dreams so hard to beat. Console yourself with the fact it would probably have gone sour anyway.
Melancholic and reflective poem but a good one.There's no love like unrequited love!
...and there's no love like first love!
This is true high school longing. Glad you shared it with us.
An unusually insightful and penetrating self-revelation for a tenth grader. Woot!
Wow. How much did you tweak? That's a lot of talent for 10th grade.
Believe me when I say that the tenth grade version of me had the world before him and could have been almost anything, under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, the right circumstances were not to be found...which is a story not of unrequited love, but unrequited hate, and so should be left for another time, another place, and stiff drinks.
The first verse is word for word, except I swapped "for aye" for "fore'er" in the rewrite. I was going for the 5/7/5/7/7 syllabic form, so I couldn't just say "forever."
The second verse is pretty much word for word until the last line, which I rewrote last week.
The third verse is true to the theme of the original third verse, but there was much tweaking of words in it.
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