In The Light Field

I’m not good enough to feel good,
I’m not strong enough to give in,
I’m too weak to hang on,
I repeat all my sins,
They say love is a drug,
Let it flow through my veins,
Until I am consumed,
In all its bitter pain,
If God is so good,
Why let a Rose wilt away?
I don’t care for delusions,
On me they shall not prey,
The bells of misfortune
Chime loudly in my ears,
But to hell with conforming
To the sound of my peers,
We can’t explain
Why the stars fill the sky,
We are all born to inevitably die,
But our dreams and imagination,
Distant worlds and exploration,
The kinetic theory of heat,
Shows that this life,
Though seemingly short,
Can surely be so sweet.

Zoë Campbell, 30/09/2005 revised: 30/04/2008


About this poem:
The original version of this poem ended quite different, and I was getting rather bored with it. And that is, quite obviously, a bad sign for a poem. I think it ended too giddy and didn’t fit in with the general tone of the poem, at least now I think even though it still has an uplifting ending, it’s more subtle and over all I think it makes the poem come together a lot nicer. I actually should post the other version, just to see what people prefer. I’ll do that at a later date. Also, I wrote the line ‘The kinetic theory of heat’ when I was on the wikipedia page for kinetic theory and initially I just put it in as a joke, but when I was trying to think of something to change it to it struck me that maybe it is best just to leave it in there. In a way it kind of metaphorically suggests one of the things I’m interested in, science.