Composed and posted by Jenna Gullickson, this original composition piece aims to portray the conflict of repression and external expectations present in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God". Original composition and poem by Jenna Gullickson.
Ships At A Distance
Pale fresh buds, innocent youth
The sun, a kind orb of warmth
Laughs along with me in my harmless games
The earth is all open
All for my exploring
All for my love
All for my adventure
All for my dreams
My soul leaps with the possibilities
The beginning of true life, but
It is
Fading
Freedom is
Not for this life, joy is
Not for a naive fool like me
Love can be forced?
Developed by time?
Repression of soul and spirit
This can't
It can't be life
Or love
Or dreams--
A glimmer
A smiling figure, the image of hope and adventure
Inviting me to a new life, to success, to true purpose
To action, to a new home
The world is our home, our castle
We reign, we make the rules
We? You
Me? Stay
Silent, back, do not let go.
Keep together, in painful perfection.
Images of ourselves, tall and lofty,
Of gilded sheets of paper money
We worship them,
You worship them
I abhor them
They scoff at my soul, my very being
My loves, suffocated.
Death.
A strange freedom overcomes my being,
No image to maintain
Without expectations, my soul breathes again
It sheds the dusted, musty armor
It wore to shield the arrows of judgment and inadequacy.
Vulnerable, I never felt so safe
Again, love approaches me
But with a different song.
Child-like joy over rules
The gilded images that had dictated my life
"Ships at a distance hold every man's dreams on board."
Though, the raging waters thwart every man
From attaining these dreams.
Some men do not wait for the ships
They swim out to them,
They fight the waves, they reach their dreams
Others wait in their comfortable porch chairs for their dreams to reach the shore
By the time their lives arrive, they are half spent, but
The dreams are just as sweet, if they are ever found,
As the buds of honeysuckle to a youth's taste.
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