"Hemingway handed me a heavy heart, dressed in an optimistic title"
The first time I read Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”
Every page seemed like an addition of an addiction,
To adrenaline and affairs,
And pretending not to see love-
as it sits beside you-
Too boring, perhaps;
Or maybe too hopeful.
Hemingway handed me a heavy heart,
Dressed in an optimistic title.
Tomorrow might start itself up,
And pass itself along through each season,
But nothing will ever change.
The sun also rises-
It’s just another observation that the lost and lonely make;
Said out loud to solidify the hope that we can try again- tomorrow.
Hemingway did not tap lightly in his inking of real loss in an unfocused time.
He could not have known how lost some of us are now;
Although his titled hope for a new day never made contact with his own over-dressed darlings,
Maybe the shadow of sorrow’s sentiment sewn into each sentence
Was the signature of his own kind of lonely;
The one only cured by his bedside bottle.
Inside characters carrying weight-of-the-world hearts; engaging in casual, wealthy conversations scrawled all over those pages-
Meaning to mean nothing and nothing repeated-
Maybe Hemingway found the real depth in the bottom of his thirst.
The sun also rises:
I wear his words like a badge of belief;
Still wondering if he saw certainty of sunrise with the same damned optimism,
Or just scrawled a title; something summoned by the softness of hard spirits.
Choked as he emptied his tumbler,
With cynicism, with satire;
The knowledge that the lost and those who have lost will believe dawn can be different in redemption,
When all the sunrise signifies is a life of Sisyphus;
Where time moves mountains, and money, and maturation.
And you,
You do not move at all.
Thanks Ashleigh. Brings back memories of English Class in High School. 😎