Part 1 of The Distance Between the Unfathomable Truths of Human Experience
Category: Poems

Human experience is an everlasting moment. We try to define it, identify it, find the words for it, yet these all fall short and ultimately confine it to something smaller than it is. Everyone who has ever existed will claim to experience life yet it is only in very brief moments do we find another individual that is experiencing something even vaguely comparable to our own. To prove something through science is to be able to replicate it repeatedly- so how do we prove to each other and ourselves what it means to be a living human soul when this experience is so indescribable. I've spent hours searching for words that do not exist, so in my search to prove this feeling and experience I have lived so briefly still, I have created art.  In my collection of poems to which I title, The Distance Between the Unfathomable Truths of Human Experience, I try to encapsulate moments and feelings through whimsical imagery and impossibility that I will be writing and recording here as an essay for my poetry final..  Art is one of the timeless inherent aspects of human kind. It sets us apart from animals. It is our message to the future and our eyes into the past. It is through art and human creation can we prove our existence and experience. Where words and explanations have always fallen short, art has filled the gaps. 

 Fleeting

If this is all I may have,

Then I am willing-

To cradle this sunbeam at noon.

I’ll entwine this beam

Between slender, silver fingers-

And stroll with it

Hand in hand,

Till half-seven 

Toward an evening in June.

I will swim through the water

To the moon-

On shiny beams,

My crystalline barque;

A celestial dream.

For a moment,

I’ve caught the tide-

And cup a crescent lune.

If this is all I may have-

Then I am willing.

Fleeting glimpses

 haunt new fevers

And obscured reflections

In rippling, kaleidoscoping 

moments That shift

 at the touch of my cradled fingers.

Grasping at the untouchable passage,

In this quiet respite-

I’m handed a sunbeam from you.

In my poem, “Fleeting,” I try to convey short, sweet moments. Whether it be obvious things such as love, beauty, or some very specific moment that has brought joy. The inherent mortality of all things is bittersweet; which I describe through the metaphors of cradling the unphysical sunlight, or a reflected moon. Moments are beautiful- however ungraspable. I was similarly inspired by an untranslatable word “Saudade '' which is a Portuguese word describing a longing or nostalgia for something passed, or nonexistent. 

Moments are brief and beautiful and we find ourselves looking back more than looking toward. “If this is all I may have, then I am willing” is my peaceful declaration of acceptance. Moments are brief and I am gracious to them. I compare this to a movement in time, in which I “stroll with it, Hand in hand, Till half-seven Toward an evening in June,” symbolic of going with these human moments as they happen, and as the poem progresses from noon- to evening- to night. This gradual closing of moments I am expressing is reiterated in “for a moment, I've caught the tide” and  how I can only keep up as they come because the tide will pass yet again.  The last nine lines of my poem are where I bring together the mood I want to tell. Initially, it was meant to be a sad and aching feeling of lost time haunted by memories. Yet, I remembered that this is a continuous living cycle. As I sat at my desk, I exhausted myself at how I could possibly create the most important part of my poem since I started it- which is ending it. My best friend waddled over to me from their corner in the room to show me the most ridiculous, and silly video. Suddenly the moment started again, and it was complete.