Refrain

[rocky stag]

The Universe said I love you.
It whispered ‘neath the throng
of gnashing teeth and weeping
that carries us along.

The waves of turmoil crashing,
they say it’s all gone wrong.
We rage until the light has died,
and lie that we are strong.

In heights of hubris ever lofty,
our vilest sins repeated oftly.
The Universe still continues softly
as I quietly join its song.

This is my first ever poem. No one I’ve showed it to has gotten my intended meaning. I did purposefully leave it a bit vague to leave it up to interpretation, but I realize that if no one is getting it then it may just legitimately be a skill issue with the writing. I’d like thoughts on if this needs a revision or rewrite. I’ll post another comment with a spoilered explanation of inspirations and meaning one of my friends asked for but I do ask that you give feedback blind before reading that.

||1. When you learn history there are basically 2 schools of thought that always arise when it comes to atrocities that happened in the past.

1. People were savages back then and now we are much better. 2. That’s just how things were back then and we can’t apply our standards to the past.
   I think both are naïve. The people in the past were still people. They did horrific things all the time and knew they were horrific. Yeah they were commonplace so only brave people questioned it, but that doesn’t excuse the people of the past. But that doesn’t mean that we are holier than they are. Humans are largely the same today as they have always been, casually doing horrible things because it’s socially acceptable. It is fundamentally human nature to accept injustice because of peer pressure.
   There are lots of people who say they love humanity but can’t look the truth of humanity in the face and accept that the bad stuff is also fundamentally human.

2. The current state of political polarization more than ever shows that people just say the thing they like is wholly good and the thing they don’t like is wholly evil. Plenty of people support evil things all the time because it’s bundled in with good things. Almost no one takes the time to consider that they could be evil because everyone always assumes themselves to be good.

3. During Artemis II I saw a lot of people say “How can we enjoy this when there’s so much bad going on down here” and also “This is all that matters, this is what humanity was meant to do once we get past the petty squabbles on earth”. While this one is a lot less all encompassing, it still makes me frustrated seeing these sentiments. Two things can be true at once. Not everything, even the important stuff, can be all encompassing. If you treat everything as all about one thing you cease to see reality as it is.||

||4. This one actually stemmed from a question my dad asked me. We were talking about space stuff and he asked why we should care about going to mars. I answered with the basic “y’know for science and exploration and colonization and the huge amount of important technology that would be invented in the effort and yada yada yada”. But something bothered me about the interaction. It felt like the answer I gave was missing something, and it felt like the question itself was flawed.
I realized that the reason I felt that way was because such a utilitarian view on spaceflight is fundamentally different to how I see it. Spaceflight to me is art.
Life and the universe are fundamentally beautiful. There is so much bad in the world and even in space everything is trying to kill you. But the universe is everything we ever experience and everything we possibly could. In the totality of everything there is so much positive in the universe that I could never say the negative outweighs it. And life is our narrow window into this beautiful beautiful universe. It feels like the universe reaching out and whispering I love you.
So we assemble the best minds and the best trained and we sail out into the universe in a tin can on top of a bomb to experience it for ourselves. We could send unfeeling robots, and we do, but it’s always in preparation for us to follow behind. Higher. Better. Faster. Smarter. More Skilled. More Trusting. The Best. With love from Earth. Space flight, in my eyes is us putting our best foot forward and saying I love you right back to the universe.
Ok that got a little off track but basically the point I’m making is that sometimes people are too caught up in the why of things to see the inherent beauty of life of the things we do.
There’s a great quote that I think sums it up really well. George Mallory, one of the people on some of the first attempts to climb Mt. Everest was asked why he wanted to climb it. He said “Because it’s there”.||

||5. The actual poems I was inspired by:

Do not go gentle into that good night
By Dylan Thomas

High flight
By John Gillespie Magee Jr.

So basically the story of my poem is the realization that the universe is beautiful and it loves us but then looking full faced into the truth of humanity and realizing that this is what we truly are and what we will continue to be. The final lines can be interpreted two ways. 1. giving up and becoming one with the horribleness 2. (My personal interpretation) realizing the inherent contradictions of humanity where we do good as easily and frequently as we do bad, and that I too am part of the evils. Then, having seen humanity’s worst, deciding that the universe is right and joining it in singing “I love you” to humanity.||

[rustic frigate]

Hi there
I thought it was about how the universe will keep going despite the nature of the humans tbh

But from the last line there i'd say the persona joins the 'song' of the universe after realizing it futile to try and struggle from his fate he decides to join th rest

Like he tried to change the very nature of man but gives up realizing his efforts are like a mere drop in the vast ocean

[rocky stag]

Thanks for reading! ||That is one of the intended interpretations, but not the primary one I was going for. It seems like most everyone I’ve had read it has come away with that meaning. Do you think I went too hard on the doom and gloom and that’s why the twist at the end isn’t working as intended? I’m just not sure how to fix the problem without changing the message or removing possible interpretations||