The End is Only the Beginning

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Charlene Delfin

Camp NaNoWriMo 2015 word count: 43,715

Was on Facebook last night, when a notification suddenly popped up that one of my friends in the Nepal quake was safe. Then another notification showed, saying the same thing about another friend in Nepal. I checked the notification, and learned that Facebook already has this feature that allows international friends to check if their friends in certain areas are safe during disasters. Nice new website feature, Zuckerberg.

I'm glad that my friends in Nepal are safe. There's a talented poet there. He recently got a job as a writer in their local newspaper.

In Camp NaNoWriMo and "10th Commandment," I spent midnight describing a crime scene. Crime scenes in movies are made to be presentable, far from the truth about real crime scenes. I've seen real crime scenes. Was walking to church one morning when I passed by this empty lot and saw a corpse of a man with a hole through his head. I've also been to other crime scenes. Now, I'm divided between making my descriptions close to reality, or following the conventions of storytelling.

For the NaPoWriMo 2015 Day Twenty-Six challenge, we are to write a persona poem. I've written persona poems since, like, I started writing poems. That has been my reputation in poetry: poetic shape-shifting.

My poem today is written from a pen. It's calling to the poet, who's been killed by "kings." Despite its longing for the poet, it also hints that it will soon be taken up by a new poet. This pattern of the poem actually demonstrates the story of poetry and literature since the ancient times: it never ends. It's a cycle that goes on and on, continuing to reflect reality beyond their creators' lives.

This poem also gathers inspiration from all of my other poems where I mentioned my pen. Like "Apollo" (one of my poems that are dedicated to the Greek god of poetry), and "Memory" (my poem about the eternal power of words). There are many previous poems from me that got mentioned a bit in this. Also, the title is another version of my old poem, "Rooster."

When my classmates and I graduated from our HarvardX Humanities course, we wrote letters (partly in Greek) to our professor. Some of us gave him pictures of a rooster. It's in reference to Socrates, with whom our course ended. Socrates said that he owed a rooster to Asclepius before he allowed himself to be executed. It's about the end of his life only being the victory and continuation of his cause. (Photo credit: me. The pen that I mentioned in "A Bow to the Queen," the one that hasn't written any great poem yet. I have four different handwritings and I used the one that I use the least for the photo of that post, intentionally messing it up to hide its real appearance and hide my character from the poem. Just a bit of art.)

For Asclepius

Hello, my long lost friend.
Since I lost you to sleep,
I thought this was my end.
For I no longer weep
Away my dark color
For all of your deep lore.

All of my soft tears stay
Within the cold of me,
No longer filling day
With a fragrance so sweet,
The fragrance of all words
That can break the kings' swords.

O we don't have to speak
To make the nations weak,
To make their secrets leak.

Loved to feel your embrace,
And we danced in the night,
Caught in your secret grace.
But when kings use their might
Take you away from me
Your thoughts I can still see.

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