Fight Against the Sun

I wrote this for a poetry class and had it published in my college's literary magazine. I'd love to know what people think!

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

                                                            ~William Butler Yeats

The sunrise was beautiful once,

you and I huddled close

two pups just trying to disentangle

from cords wrapped round our feet,

holding us with threat of death

telling us how to be one of them

and when we should come home.

 

We used to scream “Anarchy!”

While the music blared,

in loud defiance of the world.

Hands raised up in time,

with the pulsing rhythm that held

our minds enslaved with thought

about escape and freedom.

 

And then we both changed.

Pulled to both ends of that world.

You sought to help the world,

and I wanted to destroy it.

I was caught in that desire for change.

and saw war as the only way to win

the never-ending battle against life.

 

You asked me if I was happy,

fighting everything in sight.

With fists covered in blood,

dripping testament to the change

that pushed you from my arms

and into another country’s strife,

where you sought to help the poor.

 

I never forgot about you,

after you said you were afraid,

I might snap at you sometime.

You left me wondering how I could

have let myself be deceived,

by dreams of society’s death

at the hands of teens who knew no better,

 

 

I looked up at the sky one day

after that bus took you from me

to learn to save the world.

I stared at the sun and searched

for an answer amongst the clouds,

to a question that I had no right to ask,

of a God I had long ago forgot.

 

The sunset tonight is cold and dim,

radiating against the distant sky.

I wonder what you are doing,

if you found safety in your escape,

with a saddened sigh I stand up,

finding strength in the dying light,

knowing the sun will rise again.

 

Where the sun once was

the moon will try hard to light,

and stand out against the shadowed sky.

Not fighting though because it learned,

when you laid your dreams out before me,

trying to illuminate my bleak, haunted life,

but I ripped them apart in anger.

 

When I heard you died last night,

in a peacekeeping mission gone wrong,

tears left my blood-shot eyes,

and the whiskey bottle lay empty,

unable to force down the image,

of all the things I had destroyed,

that sunrise we’d never share again.