Grim Poetry

Okay, my Language Arts teacher (who is, despite the fact that he give me nefarious projects sometimes, totally awesome) had arranged for our class to have a Cafe Day (a day where we eat doughnuts, cookies and drink hot chocolate while talking about the books we read that month) with the 7th graders since it may be his last year teaching at our school. I look forward to being there, eating all the doughnuts and baffling all the kids in my class once again at my inability to handle that much sugar (I totally loose my mind when I'm fed sugar, so be wise, my friends and don't do it), but there's a catch. To be allowed to eat the doughnuts, you have to do a project.

In the past we've done posters, CDs, skits, dress-up days, more posters, models, dioramas, even more posters and other fun projects that are basically like jazzed-up book reports, but this time, our teacher wants us to NOT DO A POSTER (Aw man! I've gotten so good at those!) and write a poem.

So that's what I did. But you see, the book I read this month was called THE KILLING OF WORLDS by: Scott Westerfeld and it's about this empire consisting of eighty worlds whose Emperor has supposedly created a piece of technology that can bring the dead back to life and grant them immortality. It's a really good book... but (spoiler warning) in the end it basically says that nothing can stop death and that, although we can postpone it, death is inevitable.

Kinda grim, right?

But I wrote a poem about it anyway, so I thought I might as well share it with you.

Enjoy:

DEATH
By: Caitlin Lawrence

From the very beginning man had a quest,
To stop the forces putting the dead to rest,
To confiscate death’s ruling power
So man would live at the very last hour.

But time went on and countless souls were lost,
People wept at bodies buried in frost,
Mourning the passing of what mattered most
And hoping one day, to death they could boast…

Of their sweet triumph over death’s strong hold,
That it was worth stopping the lives being sold,
And no law of nature could keep them enslaved,
That all men of earth could at last be saved.

But when man invented that splendorous device,
One that brought the dead back enough to suffice,
And the people believed that death had died
And not a soul realized that the man had lied…

A great war broke out to find what was true,
Making whole planets bruised black and blue,
Killing more men than death had taken,
Proving to man that death hadn’t been shaken.

“The dead are dying” the people cried,
“Kill the Emperor, for his foolish pride,
For thinking that he could stop such a thing,
And telling us that life would never be fleeting,”

We scream “Save us, someone, for our lives are lost,
Our fruitless quest came with a merciless cost
And now we know, better than anyone living
That life isn’t life unless it’s worth giving.”

“And no one, no matter how smart or high-minded,
Can make a device that can trump what’s been binded…
To us and our kind, our people, our wife…
Death is a natural part of life.”