Why is it that sorrow paints the most vivid pictures?
That agony sculpts statues from cold marble, chiseling grief into perfection,
while joy slips through my fingers like water,
unable to hold its form long enough to be carved into eternity?
I have seen novels woven from suffering,
each word a bruise pressed into the page,
and I have sung along to symphonies of heartbreak,
where violins wail in a language older than time.
Yet, when I am happy, truly happy,
the words dissolve before they reach the paper,
the melody hums itself into silence.
Perhaps misery lingers because it demands to be known.
It stains the mind like ink, like red wine on white linen,
a blot that will not be scrubbed away.
Joy is light, ephemeral—a sunbeam through a cracked window,
and when it leaves, it does so without a trace.
Is it that in darkness we see light most clearly?
That when we fall into the abyss,
we can finally measure the sky’s distance?
Or is it simply that suffering forces us inward,
makes us historians of our own wounds,
and from that catalog of aches, we shape something immortal?
I wonder if humanity was made to remember pain,
if at our core we are creatures of longing,
forever chasing ghosts of what we lost,
of what we never even had.
If we were made for joy, we would hold onto it,
bottle it, sing it into permanence.
But joy fades, and grief carves.
One is water, the other is stone.
And so I wonder—
what does that make us?
First poem after being in a slump
Let me know what you think
