I chose The Afterlife for this pick-a-poet blog, albeit ambivalently at first. (Pretty nice alliteration huh?) Anyways, I was uncertain about choosing a poem about the after-life as I feel that it’s a bit played out, yet here I am discussing it. The poem was really pleasant, painting a nice picture of an afterlife that resembles the Garden of Eden. A man and his presumed lover find themselves in a “place of savage red blossoms and rivers quietly swaying through the rocks.” The part that interested me the most was that their memories seemed to have been wiped with all earthly recollections being behind a mist. This reminded me of the book series “The Maze Runner” in which these teens are sent into this maze, basically used as lab rats by a giant corporation that is trying to find a cure to a disease that has taken over the human race and turned everyone into zombies. Spoiler Alert: The company created the disease to deal with overpopulation and to start humanity anew. Anyways, the correlation is that when they are sent into the maze they have no recollection of their past lives as their memories are wiped. It’s interesting to juxtapose these two examples of memory loss, but one with rather evil connotations and one with a sense of liberation.
I’m not going to speak about whether the afterlife is real or not as I feel that everything that can be said has been already. But it is real, lol. At least I hope. It was a bit strange in the poem when Dick Allen describes how the protagonist and his partner “built a small wood cabin in whatever place this is.” Do they just live eternally in this state of limbo? Why do they enter heaven at this specific age and do they continue to age?
I purposefully omitted the part about “did our love survive” as I found it to be a bit cheesy, but hey maybe some people like romanticizing the afterlife.
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ReplyDeleteThe afterlife is something that I am very curious about, but it is hard for me to believe anything I hear about because there is no evidence.
ReplyDeleteI like the cheesy comment at the end. I am not really sure what to think about the afterlife, but I do believe our souls go somewhere.
ReplyDeleteThe afterlife is something that is very complicated to talk about because there is not much to back it up. I think that it is a very deep thing to write a poem about.
ReplyDeleteI honestly used to think a lot about whether there was or wasn't an afterlife, but that mystery of not knowing whether there is or isn't one is a really captivating thought. The fact that the author chose to write about a topic that is unknown to us is really commendable, as it has a certain depth that can't be backed up by anything more than "This is what I think" or "This is how I feel."
ReplyDelete-Bella
I feel like an afterlife doesn't exist. it just seems like a way to comfort the living so that they aren't afraid to die or have peace of mind that their loved ones are safe and at peace
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