Our friend Kim’s hosting this week’s Poetics Challenge over at dVerse Poets, and she presents us with a metaphorical Rumi poem, The Guest House, about being human, and asks us to write one of our own, beginning (as does Rumi’s) with the words, “This being human is…”
———[||]———
Been There, Done That
This being human thing is the
longest, steepest uphill hike
you’ll ever have to make,
only to arrive exhausted
but denied the chance
to stand there, silent,
even for only a moment
gratefully taking in the view
before you’re forced to
cut your own brake lines
and careen back down
totally out of control
sliding off the path
time and time again
but never really crashing
until you end up
back where you started,
forced to start again.
—————[|||]—————
dVerse Poets
Tuesday Poetics
~ The Art of Being Human ~
———[||]———
Scrambled, Not Fried 
You’re a clever one! The shape and layout of your poem forced me to read it as if I was on the ‘longest, steepest uphill hike’, Ron, and I felt exhausted when I reached the end. Next time, may I have a view, please? 😊
I think you capture the Sisyphean aspect of living… it’s only the boulder that’s missing.
Smile through it all and you win! 😁
the hill hike to the inevitable crash … surely there were some pleasantries along the way …
This is absolutely BRILLIANT, Ron! Like Kim, I too read this poem twice. It does feel like an uphill hike 🙂
Well, Sisyphus, a beautiful write. Long ago I wrote a poem that began “Once I stood atop the mountain, the mistress of all I surveyed. How sweet to survey my kingdom for which I’d so dearly paid. Then I slipped from the promontory, which it seemed I had only just gained, and I found that I stood in the valley with the mountain before me again”.
I agree with Bjorn’s comment and also like how you wrote this poem as one long, run-on sentence.
This piece reminds me of Thomas Lux’s “And Still it Comes”. Nice Work! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48480/and-still-it-comes
sounds like reincarnation to me. but please just once can i stop and smell the roses or take in the view
‘forced to cut your own break lines’. I’m going to remember that line for a while.
Wow! The structure is amazing! Rising and falling-also made me chuckle. 😉
A farmer’s life (farmer’s wife) can feel like that, believe me!
Wow, I really like the simplicity of your words but the depth of the meaning! Great work!
A great poem of the ups and downs of being human. The cycle of being human is really a challenge. Sometimes we don’t always handle it very well.
And every time we get back to the peak, we try for that deep calming breath before we crash back to ground level. Excellent evocation of this being human.
The loss of punctuation in the downhill half is very clever. It has to be read in one breath, so that you arrive breathless at the bottom of that hill. Like it.
What a long strange trip it’s been… and been… and been.
I have made that trip more than a time or two….one thing about humans: we are resilient. Smiles.
Reading this, found myself asking “Who/what controls the going up and coming down?” And again the answer just pops out of nowhere “It’s being human.” I would agree.
Being human is being a puppet out of control – you get tamed with invisible hands, and circumstances, needs…
I think most can resonate with this. Very well-written and clever!
Reads like the hikers guide to DIY reincarnation — and I loved the hell out of it Ron — well written my friend!
Wow, I felt this one–made me tense up all my muscles.
Life is filled with mountains and sometimes we stumble and have to start over….resilience keeps us going. You took me on that hike…
It’s crash through or crash. I climbed that hill with you and came rolling down again.