Skip to main content

She hopes, I exist

 


Diya Geomin is a grade 12 student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala, India. She wrote the following poem about a close friend of hers who is struggling with depression. Notice how the problems of the other person intertwine with those of the poet persona.

 

She hopes, I exist

By Diya Geomin

 

She hopes to see the better world

She hopes to know her true self

That nobody, even herself, knows 

She hopes to find a new fantasy 

To escape some time alone.

 

She hopes to hide under the stairs

To cry out her pain somewhere no one cares 

She hopes to escape into her books.

With the pennies she doesn't have.

 

She hopes to run away to an unknown place.

Full of surprises, waiting to be startled.

Waiting to be claimed, owned and used

Be with every lover her books could offer.

 

Yet to her dismay, she finds none.

It's only herself, all alone

Hoping for some twisted ways to escape

Hanging by a thread waiting to be dropped.

 

Just like me, she dreams

Dreams left unfulfilled 

Only to haunt her soul forever 

 

Oh, how ironic that you hope,

Unlike me, who let the shadows consume my mind.

You hope and hope until there is nothing left 

You believe in destiny, not yet proven.

You go with the flow and be exhausted.

 

Unlike me who's covered in the black ink

Hope is dangerous, it kills you from within.

Until all there is left are our tears

The tears of betrayal.

 

So, my love, I'm helpless like that

Waiting to be devoured by the darkness within.

So, while you do, please hope for me too. 


 xZx

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 21, 2024 at 7:38 AM

    Wow

    ReplyDelete
  2. Priyabrata NandaMay 21, 2024 at 8:08 AM

    Some of the readers of her poetry would in actuality find this poem to be their own saga, experiencing excruciating pain and hopelessness. For others, it could be self- discovery with eluding solutions.
    Overall, an excellent poem from an young sojourner.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. LeylahMay 21, 2024 at 5:46 PM

      Thank you so much. It is indeed a perspective of a person who hoped too much but got nothing in return. But they still continue to encourage others to hope even though they got nothing from it.

      Delete
  3. parwatisingariMay 21, 2024 at 10:45 AM

    Very intense. Maybe she should speak to me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. LeylahMay 21, 2024 at 5:42 PM

      Thank you so much for your appreciative words.

      Delete
  4. Lakshmi ShajiMay 21, 2024 at 8:17 PM

    Powerful words...

    ReplyDelete
  5. DawnanddewMay 21, 2024 at 8:37 PM

    Beautifully crafted words! It's difficult to find such friends today. The lines are deeply melancholic and reassuring.

    ReplyDelete
  6. VinayMay 21, 2024 at 9:45 PM

    I love the last line - I'm helpless like that, Waiting to be devoured by the darkness within - it has as deep sense of sadness to it, a sense of reality about hopelessness and wonder. Very moving..

    ReplyDelete
  7. Liz A.May 21, 2024 at 10:04 PM

    Moving poem.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousMay 22, 2024 at 10:23 AM

    This poem reminds me of a thought that was written on the bulletin board of our classroom in Sawan. It said- " Never lose hope. Hope is a rope that swings you through life". Being from a Gurjar ethnicity, it was not easy to have a warm rapport with my teachers. So once my mathematics teacher read that thought and told me very sarcastically-"Beta! Tum bhi HOPE karte rahna, ek din zaroor maths mein pass ho jaoge".And guess what? I failed over and over again😊. Somethings never change, you see. Nostalgia strikes!

    Yours Last bencher:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 22, 2024 at 11:27 AM

      A lot of things could be different if we talked personally with people concerned. For example, if you had developed some sort of a rapport with that teacher, the entire situation would have been a lot different.

      Yet, I'm happy you're able to smile over these things now. All the best. I wish I could talk to you personally.

      Delete
    2. LeylahMay 22, 2024 at 4:40 PM

      This poem is about two people who are similar in character except for their perspective of hope. One of them is very hopeful while the other hoped too much and got nothing in return even though she encourage the other two hope. Because, could it be just her or is everyone unlucky in life?...

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalMay 22, 2024 at 6:07 PM

      If you start establishing contacts with people, you'll realise how sad most lives are!

      Delete
  9. Pradeep NairMay 22, 2024 at 12:00 PM

    Melancholic and intense.

    ReplyDelete
  10. marietta pereiraMay 22, 2024 at 6:31 PM

    The poem tugs at your heart strings.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
13 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more