Sharing 5: I don't write well enough

A series of my teachers' favourite works: Part 5 of 5

At long last, my favourite work shared.

Happy birthday Meaghan! Thank you for always being there for me. Even though you're miles away, you're never further than a whatsapp message and maybe a few seconds delay between my exclamation that I have some amazing news and my actual telling. Thank you for faithfully reading my blog and quoting me once in a while when I happen to write a little burst of genius. I hope you do well for your recent exams and the ones to come. <3 I checked. There are no typos. 

/edit: I found a typo god why does this always happen to me/

This piece was written by a VJ graduate who was a stellar writer. She wrote a poem explaning why she didn't want to be a writer; she gave up writing to be a doctor.

On Choosing the Scientific Path  by Joanna Chan

There was once I'd be a writer, I thought writing was for me;
I would wield my pen to save the world, I'd write to make men free.
The hunger of the poets and the madness of their kind,
The language and the lightning of the human urge to find,
These were not new to the pathways of my blood and of my mind.

And though it seems a futile hope beyond my youthful powers,
I thought in proud and idealistic vein;
I'd assail the fort of memory, I'd do it all alone;
I'd liberate the jewels of its musty, mould'ring depths;
I'd seek out the high places, I would see the treasure gleamed afresh,
And the flags of faded glory would once again be noised.

But
I don't want to write about the worries of a weary world,
Where the cannons flash with freshly minted modern modes of death
And six thousand people die because of hijacked aviation,
And six million people die forgotten in a dusty nation.
And the world flees by distracted by the short span of themselves,
And the centuries of poets lie forgotten on the shelves.
There are poets out there, words enough to speak truth far and near;
There is ageless, reachless beauty all about our worldly sphere.
It remains for those among us who will seek it to be glad;
But the most part of our people strive but to be warmly clad;
And each day, hark at the humans who are living and are dying,
Or who sicken, or whom war claims for the ranks of wounded crying.
There's a thousand ways men suffer, which sheer beauty cannot heal
And truth, though splendid, has not ever made a decent meal.

For how will you get human minds to turn towards the light,
When their painted veil called Life is coloured already with pain -
There are doctors of the body, there are doctors of the soul;
But the latter rarely matter to those in flesh not yet whole;
And though Art is a bright window out of the Platonic cave,
And though myth means much to masses whom poetry does much to save;
Yet the multitude is much too weak to see the banners wave.

I wanted to be a writer, but I don't write well enough,
And I would have been a poet, but my verses make me laugh.
And all things seem to show that that was ne'er my destiny.
So a healer of a different sort is what I hope to be;
And medicine, as Hugo, Giono, showed, does much to set men free. 

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View all the other works shared in the lectures here: #sharing /1/2/3/4/this post