This one was for the Reflections Contest, themed "Together we can". Read it all the way through before you react...
Cold. Cold seeps through me. An ice dagger pierces, paralyzes my thoughts, freezes them all. Only one falls still on my motionless mind, only one frozen shard of sentience. I can't. I can't, I can't! No more. I can't. This fact hammers the walls of my skull as my heart pounds the numbing cold through my body. And I shiver at the cold, at the dark it recalls to my heart. The dark that I see around me, that I glimpse every day in shadows behind tired eyes, in hollow laughs concealing weary hearts, in the lack of light in my peers. The dark that shines blackly out of crude words making black light of the most serious matters. The dark that devours any fresh innocence, and corrupts the common conception of those purest ideas beyond its reach. The cold dark looms over my mind, stirs my most hated memories, casts an awful shadow over me, cuts me off from that happy light, the warm innocence of child-like purity. That light I once knew, I once lived in.
But I know it still. I do, and I recoil from the darkness, that gross insult to the light I hold most dear. I recoil, but the darkness presses from every side. I have no escape. And I can't keep it from me any longer. I can't. No longer.
My inward scream of protest rips through my body, and I know my one voice of conscience is nothing to the world's great clamor of corruption. I am too small to the world. The great sky stretches to eternity beyond my window pane. I am so small.
Hot tears finally burst the bonds of my frozen eyes, and they shine in the moonlight. The cold blue light refracted in the drops on my eyelashes sparkles, a beautiful contrast to my thin inner wail of pain. Looking past my twinkling tears, I see the still night, the fall foliage silver in the night light, the distant clouds ringing the horizon, the low mountains gently rising out of sight. All untouched by darkness, though bathed in night shadows. And the great night silence joins my mental shout against the darkness. The silence silences the world's cacophony. The song of the birds joins the cry, and the roar of waterfalls, and the crash of thunder, and the howl of wind. And the voices of nature, united with me in triumphant tumult, overcomes the feeble cry of the world.
The cold blue moonlight still shines on my face, and warms me as it shows me the vast smallness of the world and the vast power of nature. And the moonlight banishes the darkness as I hurtle out into the depths of space, seeing in my mind the infinity which diminishes my time and space, the minutes and miles I know in life, to nothing.
And flying through the clear black between stars, I know I can. Because I am not alone. Beyond it all, beyond all existence I can imagine, is God, creator of all things, my Heavenly Father. His is the infinite power, the power of nature, the power of knowledge, the power of goodness human and divine; his power lights my world and his. And I can.
So was my meaning clear in this? Did you understand what I meant with the symbolic 'darkness'? Should I have elaborated more on what I meant by dark and light, and how the light helps me? And were the metaphors of physical sensation (cold), visual sensation (dark and light), and sound sensation too mixed?
ReplyDeleteI really liked this one, Eva, and I thought that the exploration of corruption (giving in to the world) vs. purity (escaping beyond the world), as symbolized in light vs. darkness and cold vs. warmth was follow-able. That said, there's a LOT going on metaphorically in a relatively short piece. Did you consider choosing just one sensation to epitomize the struggle that you're going through? Occasionally, the cold/dark metaphors got a bit mixed, and I thought it might be more powerful if you just honed one metaphor throughout the piece. Think carefully about the images that you're creating in the reader's mind, and then make sure that they make sense, that they are logical and can be followed in a way that doesn't defy reason. So in the first few sentences, for example, an ice dagger paralyzes your mind, but then a thought hammers in your head. Is there any way to make just that mini-metaphor more continuous? Is there a better counterpart to a dagger than a hammer--or can you keep the dagger? Just think very carefully through the metaphors that you create, and have them be as continuous as possible. I wonder how the REflections judges will respond to the overt religious content. It's true and bold on your part, and I hope you aren't penalized for it...
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I don't care an iota what the judges think of it. I wrote this because Mama wanted some semi-decent representation from LCHS literature, so I decided to write something I liked as opposed to something the judges would like...is that ridiculously arrogant of me? And thank you for the feed-back. I know I mix metaphors probably too much. I just want to convey how I understand these questions, and I understand them in sight, sound, and touch. But your point is taken, simplicity is more powerful than explicity (is that a word?).
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