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A Hard Day

Started by Blackbead, February 20, 2009, 08:24:37 AM

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Blackbead

A Hard Day


The end of a long day.
A hard day.
A day without winning and with too much trying.
Not a single, tiny victory in all that effort.
Where is the joy to match such sorrow?
Not in the effort, because
"Effort is worthless without results."
And not in dreams because,
After such a day,
Nothing is a dream if it can come true.
It is reality or it is hopeless fantasy.
And now comes the night.
God protect us from the night
That can match such a day.



Originally published in Characters: The Buffalo Soldier and Other Poems, by Stephen Sanders, Copyright 2008, Lulu Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4357-1358-1.
"It's not the gold that sets our sails, 'tis freedom and the promise of a better life that raises our black flags."

Rani Zemirah

Wow... this is one of those "bleak landscape of the soul" pieces that grip you and say "hope is lost, and so may we all be".

Powerful stuff!
Rani - Fire Goddess

Aut disce... aut discede

Blackbead

Yes, but it was written a thousand years ago.  About the same time that I wrote:

Born With One Wing

There are some things that will never be,
Some things I can only see with my mind's eye.
But that doesn't make them less real,
These things that when I feel, I want to cry.

In my soul lives a lover and a knight
Who struggles to do what is right and bring others joy.
But he's deaf, he's dumb, and he's blind --
He stumbles on in my mind like some angry god's toy.

Is there a world where I can be
The simple man who is me without giving others pain?
Or is a cell my doom?
To live in an empty room, learning to love my chain?

Each day I find it harder to cry;
I'm giving up trying to fly, like a bird born with one wing.
If I can't have what I crave
Then bring on my grave . . . I don't want anything.


         Stephen Sanders
         ©1985

These days I am in a very different place but I am going back and finding these old works and bringing them back to life.  It's strange pulling these out and typing them in; I feel like I'm typing in poems written by someone else.  But it's incredible seeing these old poems and reading them again after all this time.  I look at them and say, "I wrote that?"  I don't think these are right for any of the books I'm working on right now but they WILL find a home someday.
"It's not the gold that sets our sails, 'tis freedom and the promise of a better life that raises our black flags."

Rani Zemirah

I understand the feeling. Most of my stuff is from long ago now, and it's been so long since I wrote any poetry that it all seems almost foreign to me! I don't write anything like I did way back when, although if I look closely I can see how and when I was in the process of evolving... and it suddenly makes more sense.
Rani - Fire Goddess

Aut disce... aut discede