Poetry is the language of the heart and soul. A common theme in my heart has been the sometimes-overwhelming sense of responsibility I feel to those who will inhabit this earth after I am gone. This prose poem, titled “Our Families,” is a piece I wrote in an effort to express the familiar feeling of being born into a world that has already been shaped by generations past and how those feelings can either cause us to atrophy into inaction and surrender or ignite us into building a better world for all future beings.
“Our Families”
So strange how the world befalls us. I am a part of this world, I push it forward and yet its current position in time is not at all my doing. Years stretch into the past, where creatures like me are living, pushing their world along in my direction. They don’t know me and I will never know them, yet their very thoughts and decisions decorate the streets I will roam and paint the walls of my home. How intimate. Stretched out before me, further than I perhaps can imagine, live those whose streets I decorate, whose walls I am painting. I hope they will enjoy the colors I choose. I do not always like the shades past creatures have picked for my room. I look at the pigments and no matter the frustration that takes me there is no number to call. There is no creature on Earth who can truly answer for the choices made by those who lived before, those who set the table my children will eat from. Is there a human alive who has not pondered the absence of control they possess over the choices made by people past, yet somehow we forget that this condition is utterly hereditary. Whether we consider as much or refuse to, we carry on our shoulders the very fate of those who follow. They are us! They are. How magnificent it is to imagine an existence where this inescapable reality is neither ignored nor feared but embraced! Perhaps one of the many meanings of life is to live not only for ourselves now, but equally for those that follow. They will be our families how could we have forgotten?
