Our Bed of Rocks

The poem

The physical manifestation of feelings on a journey from rock bottom to the achieved reality of a dream.

Someday, we’ll climb on top of roofs
and look down the chimneys
remembering our bed of rocks

Someday, we’ll reach for the skies
and look down at the roofs
remembering our fear of heights

Someday, we’ll reach for the moon
and point to the Earth
remembering our winding roads

Someday, we’ll reach for the stars
and look back at our planets
remembering our Earth,
its winding roads,
its high roofs,
its bed of rocks

Commentary

This piece is pretty simple but it means a lot to me. I wrote it about two years ago and it has become some sort of mantra for myself. Initially, I’ve published it for friends and family on social media, then I published it under a fake name on a writing website (so if you see it there, lol dw that’s me), and now I’m finally starting to publish things here. I’ve been fairly private about my writing in the past even though its a craft that I started practicing regularly as a child, so perhaps this is the start of a new era, where I’m publishing under my real name.

I experiment a lot with my writing and for the most part, my pieces are more about exploration rather than targeted entertainment. Some experiments succeed and some don’t but I love the exploratory process and I simply want to share something I love here. I will write and have written for entertainment, but I’ll make the distinction clear between experiments and actual pieces.

This particular poem was a fairly conscious experiment in what I call metaphorical “spatial shifting”. That is, building an abstract metaphor structure that allows me to have concrete metaphors in that larger structure where the reader is shifted smoothly from one place to another with each place representing something meaningful in the larger structure.