Monday Musings: Remains to be Found
This week I am discussing my poem Remains to be Found. Like many of my other poems, this poem has themes strongly tied to life, death and the meaning of my existence.
This poem, to me, has some fantasy qualities that I attribute to a video game. To expand upon this, one afternoon I was playing the game Skyrim. If you don't know what that is, just think medieval-Tolkieln-esque fantasy (the best way I can describe it to someone who hasn't heard of it). Now something I don't know if many people know about me is that when I am very relaxed I kind of zone out and often goof around by making up my own songs. One such song was made up when I was on an epic monster-killing journey. In the game you take stuff off of dead people and monsters, like money, potions, weapons, etc. I was doing this and I started singing "sifting through ghostly remains, Dwarven arrows work with Elvin bows nearly if not exactly the same." Then i stopped for a second to think about what I just sang, and it inspired me to write an entire poem that afternoon.
Now that you have the backstory of the creation, I will discuss what this poem means, and what it has to do with chronic illness/pain. The first lines of the poem are comprised of the "sifting through ghostly remains"/"Dwarven/Elvin arrow line. Then I go on to state that there is a choice, a decision one must make, to be peaceful like a writer (ink and quill), or to be brutal like a warrior (sword and blade). We all have that choice within, though it may be a hard one. As someone who has a chronic illness, the choice we have is to carry hope in our hearts or to let our pain drag us down and bury us prematurely.
The second stanza is about how even though we have to make a choice and life seems to demand it of us, it doesn't really matter in the end because we will all end up at the same place when our lives are over.
The third stanza expands upon this idea, the idea that my choice is ink and quill, my choice is to carry hope in my heart and how I feel like this is the best choice. The I state again that in the end the warrior and the writer will end up in the same place, sometimes the writer is even taken down by the warrior. We all have those two personas within us, we have to choose which to follow, though we end up in the same place either way. This is kind of a take on the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken" which talks about two different paths, that even though there are minor differences, will end at the same destination.
The final stanza of Remains to be Found is a restatement of the "Dwarven/Elvin arrow" idea, which is the same idea as the writer/warrior. We are the bows, we can choose to use a Dwarven arrow or an Elvin one, but no matter which we choose we will still fly with "a strictly singular trajectory." The final lines of the poem are an analysis of my own mortality, the fact that even though I have gone through all of this hardship and pain and chose to remain hopeful, someone in the future will find my "ghostly remains" and come to the same conclusion that I did. Like in Skyrim, the game that I discussed above, we all take something from those who have died before us. I hope that someone in the future can take my cheerful disposition with them when they find my ghostly remains.
I just want to end this Monday's musing by saying that is may seem that I am focused on death, but that isn't what I am focused n. As some who suffers from terrible pain and symptoms of Ehlers Danlos/Chiari/POTS etc. I often question my own existence. I have to look in the mirror everyday and make a conscious choice to be a peaceful writer, a hopeful person. People with chronic illness often refer to themselves (ourselves) as warriors, which is actually a combination of my above "writer/warrior" analysis. We are fighters, not violent or brutal, but strong, forceful and bold. We must fight everyday to survive and thrive when we often feel like taking the easy way out and giving up. We are warriors of hope.
I hope you enjoyed my deconstruction of Remains to be Found , be sure to check out all of my previous Monday Musings! If you are interested in reading my poetry my book The Bright Side of Dark can be found on www.amazon.com, or you can contact me.
