Your Haunted Heart
Your Haunted Heart
by Ben MacNair
Everyone lives on in memory,
you carry them in your Haunted Heart,
where every regretted word
is repeated in high definition re-play.
Everyone lives on in photographs,
strangers staring from pieces of paper.
The Children we once were,
full of hope and promise,
and their fears are your fears,
in your Haunted Heart.
My Haunted Heart
is ragged around the edges,
it holds onto things
which do it damage.
The scars it bears
are of the life that it lived,
and every beat
heals the old scar,
and prepares for the new wounds.
This piece centers on the type of fatalism which we all can relate to–failed expectations in life. The poem captures that feeling of being shaken from our foundation of happiness and outright wallowed within our life perspectives. What is it in our nature where we want so much from the world and when we don’t get it we are griefstricken and scarred for eternity?
“The Children we once were, full of hope and promise, and their fears are your fears, in your Haunted Heart.” Well put. It’s as if we have such an alternate view of what should happen in our lives and find we are fragile as glass when bad things happen. Life is harsh and it’s difficult to cultivate a truly optimistic approach to living at times. That’s our challenge I think. That’s where faith and spirituality come into play–or even rationalism. We deal with it in our own ways.
The poem does a good job in portraying the fear that is in each and every one of us–the feeling that once ill-fate strikes, it cannot be undone–that it then creates a new ‘you’ with a heavy-burdened heart that keeps on ticking yet continues to rack up pain. And it leaves me questioning the nature of the world, God, and existence in general. We have to find a way to be happy, but without making our heart so hard that we don’t feel life anymore. That’s what I think. Thanks for sharing!