Do you remember the way the stars fought for
your attention like blades of grass in the wind
beckoning to be eaten by a flock of lost sheep
desperate to uncover Truth in a post-truth world,
a world that sometimes seems to make sense
when its fine mechanics are studied intensely
like an army of ants fixated on the noble quest
to build their anthill two stories higher, leaving
all the extraneous questions of existential whys
to the philosopher-Queen who sits on the throne,
struggling to find meaning despite having great
knowledge about the workings of her whole world.
Surely you remember the smell of the pine trees
that saturated the surrounding air like a bomb, a
bath bomb dropped into a lake, its colors vibrant
even in the dark, lingering for a while until the last
traces of its existence start to disappear, only to
live forever in the memory of the proud camper
who hand-crafted the lather years ago for precisely
this reason, to watch it explode like an asteroid
crashing into a celestial body observed from earth
through a telescope by a small group of excited
old enthusiasts who had waited 40 years for the hit.
You remember the way the cool summer breeze
seemed to whisper in your ear the truths about the
simplicity of existence as you rested your mind on
those peaceful nights, wondering how this perfect
night came to be like a baby who clumsily stumbles
through a dirty room, miraculously knocking every
thing perfectly into place, but left contemplating the
nature of a thing’s proper place, and wondering if the
room might actually be worse off clean than dirty.
Inside these visions of the night, these visions of fear
and trembling that make all your bones shake like the
flurry of the legs of a millipede on its back on a rainy
day, remember the sound of my voice, the still small
voice in the night, the night that hides behind your eyes.
—
Sam Oh ’19 is a first-semester Senior in Quincy House studying Philosophy and Computer Science.