All my life, I have written for contributions, deadlines, grades, recognition –the single spark of hope that my name would be immortal. A selfish dream it might seem, but doesn’t everyone wish to be remembered? To leave a mark in this world?
You see, immortality through written words is the most powerful
kind. Memories die, words live on. And medium, like paper and the internet,
never runs out. They evolve. Words may be forgotten, buried under countless of
others, but they wait and wait –until one reads them again. And maybe, time is
not as powerful as we think, because it can never diminish the meaning of our
words or the intensity of our feelings.
Never once, I had written for myself –until now. This is me,
stripped of fancy words incomprehensible to most, of vague metaphors and insincere
proses better off tossed out the window. And this is all because of a single,
honest poem: Textbook Statistics by Arkaye Kierulf, an immortal poet who
illustrates the beauty of the world through candid onslaught of facts, numbers
and statistics. Though, I discovered this piece in such a short notice,
scrolling amongst thousands of results of “the most beautiful poem” in Google,
it has connected with me in ways hundreds of contemporary poems have failed to
do.
“On average, 5
people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by
3.22, which is good, I think.”
Were those lines from the poem? Yes.
And finish what you start, right? If I started as honest, I’ll
finish as honest.
Textbook Statistics does not follow any formal structure or a
rhyme scheme. Those were two lines out of seventy. And if you read everything, it
does not possess rhythm and the lines seem to be previously part of a paragraph
or more, and hitting the ‘enter’ key somehow transformed it into poetry.
“Time it takes
for a flower to wilt after it’s cut from the stem: five days.
Time left our sun
has before it runs out of light: five billion years.”
Facts, number, and statistics are known to share one infamous
characteristic: coldness. They deliver nothing but the truth, and never do they
sugarcoat it. And I find that kind. Lies do not protect us from the blow. It propels
us right into it.
A girl places a flower in a water-filled vase
to enjoy its beauty for a longer time. Humans continue to plunge themselves
into a dangerous study of the sun to possibly prevent its destruction. Information
urges us to treasure things before they are long gone, or in a hopeful sense, find
solutions in order to save them or at least, lengthen the time we have with
them left.
“If you think loneliness is beyond
calculation,
think of the mole digging a tunnel
underground
ninety-eight miles long to China
in one single night. If you think
beauty escapes you
or your entire genealogical tree,
consider the slug
with its four uneven noses, or the
chameleon shifting colors
under the arbitrary light. Think of
the deepest point
in the deepest ocean, the Marianas
Trench in the Pacific,
do you think anyone’s sadness can be
deeper?”
Textbook Statistics forces us to rethink of our perceptions in
life. Insecurities, fears and loneliness are not infinite –they only are for a
certain period of time if you let them. This bittersweet poem delivers an
important message that the universe is undeniably beautiful by citing all of
these truths, awakening our awareness of everything and understanding that
there is always something bigger and lesser than what we feel because it is always
how we perceive the world that makes it a better place.
“So children grow faster in the
summer,
their bright blue bodies expanding.
The ocean, after all, is blue
which is why the sky now outside your
window is bluish
expanding with the white of something
beautiful, like clouds.
Fact: The world is a beautiful
place—once in a while.”
We do not have forever and forever does not
have us. But still, the world is a beautiful place –once in a while because once is the only shot we have in life
and to see the beauty in everything makes that once our little forever.
This is my most beautiful poem: Textbook
Statistics, written by Arkaye Kierulf. Thank you for listening.
