Strength in Fragility
(A response to this poem I saw on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/vzSE0mwRHj/)
You put up such a strong front
Proud as a peacock,
strutting your stuff for all to see.
Inside, you see yourself as fragile
Using a stranger’s love
to fulfill some validation or need.
I understand the yearning for someone
But look at the truths that surround you
They speak of your true strength,
not the facsimile of pride,
but the beauty you have within.
You may be fragile, but you haven’t broken
In movement, you build up a warrior’s strength
Like a star, you shine brightly in the dark
and you don’t shine alone.
You are never as alone as you think you are.
It’s so easily to lose yourself
trying to gain a strangers approval,
to make an easy lie
with the click of a cameraphone.
Let go of all of that.
Jump over the fences blocking your way.
Keep dancing to the music
and go play in the street.
You’re just beginning to learn
how to follow your own beat.
Cirque d’Etoiles (Circus of the Stars, revised)
So many people have been passing away.
I wish it could stop.
Death has been constantly on my mind
ever since I first lost somebody I loved.
It was their time, I know,
but it hurt me because that person mattered to me.
I have people in my life who are growing old
I wonder when their time will come.
It’s never easy to understand.
It’s always sudden.
And it’s always painful.
What hurts more is when people lack empathy
when I try to make sense out of the senselessness of death.
Their empty hearts hurt
It doesn’t matter to me that I never knew these people
and that they never knew me.
These are people whose light shined into others’ lives.
Somebody out there
has just lost
a husband, a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, a wife.
They may have been as distant to me as the stars in the sky,
But their light still shined into my life.
And now their stars have gone out.
All things tend towards chaos
Life is the tightrope we walk to avoid it
Suddenly
Unexpectedly
Death arrives like the ricochet from a cannon’s blast
Throwing everything off-kilter
Down into the black without a safety net
Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints
Every life shines and fades as quickly as a meteorite in the sky
Millions of meteorites fall everyday,
yet supernovas are the ones that shake us up
We can understand the death of an old, worn out star
Yet when other stars die out, especially in quick succession,
it throws the universe off-balance
more than the deaths of little comets and meteorites
Is it just the succession?
The confusing juxtaposition between the end of one life
and the continuation of another?
The stars are supposed to be constant
yet they fall and they fade and they die
and nobody understands,
nobody explains why.
Maybe it’s not the fault in our stars
that throws us off our tightropes
Maybe each supernova
reminds us that we’re each a little infinity
and some infinities are bigger than other infinities
Stars fall and fade and die
but each supernova gives birth to something new
With each piece from the fallen stars,
we create an order out of the chaos
embracing the infinite
No safety net is needed
because our hearts are our wings
Love, the fuel that propels us to fly
You can take the stars out of the sky
but you can never take the sky itself
With love, we send a kiss out to the stars
Creating tiny pieces of light that shine in the dark