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Monique Ocampo Writes

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Strength in Fragility and Cirque D’Etoiles (revised)

Strength in Fragility and Cirque D’Etoiles (revised)

Last updated on: April 22, 2016 at 10:17 am by Monique Ocampo

Strength in Fragility and Cirque D’Etoiles (revised) 2016-04-22T10:17:36-05:00 Monique Ocampo

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Strength in Fragility

(A response to this poem I saw on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/vzSE0mwRHj/)

You put up such a strong front

Proud as a peacock,

strutting your stuff for all to see.

Inside, you see yourself as fragile

Using a stranger’s love

to fulfill some validation or need.

I understand the yearning for someone

But look at the truths that surround you

They speak of your true strength,

not the facsimile of pride,

but the beauty you have within.

You may be fragile, but you haven’t broken

In movement, you build up a warrior’s strength

Like a star, you shine brightly in the dark

and you don’t shine alone.

You are never as alone as you think you are.

It’s so easily to lose yourself

trying to gain a strangers approval,

to make an easy lie

with the click of a cameraphone.

Let go of all of that.

Jump over the fences blocking your way.

Keep dancing to the music

and go play in the street.

You’re just beginning to learn

how to follow your own beat.

Cirque d’Etoiles (Circus of the Stars, revised)

So many people have been passing away.

I wish it could stop.

Death has been constantly on my mind

ever since I first lost somebody I loved.

It was their time, I know,

but it hurt me because that person mattered to me.

I have people in my life who are growing old

I wonder when their time will come.

It’s never easy to understand.

It’s always sudden.

And it’s always painful.

What hurts more is when people lack empathy

when I try to make sense out of the senselessness of death.

Their empty hearts hurt

It doesn’t matter to me that I never knew these people

and that they never knew me.

These are people whose light shined into others’ lives.

Somebody out there

has just lost

a husband, a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, a wife.

They may have been as distant to me as the stars in the sky,

But their light still shined into my life.

And now their stars have gone out.

All things tend towards chaos

Life is the tightrope we walk to avoid it

Suddenly

Unexpectedly

Death arrives like the ricochet from a cannon’s blast

Throwing everything off-kilter

Down into the black without a safety net

Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints

Every life shines and fades as quickly as a meteorite in the sky

Millions of meteorites fall everyday,

yet supernovas are the ones that shake us up

We can understand the death of an old, worn out star

Yet when other stars die out, especially in quick succession,

it throws the universe off-balance

more than the deaths of little comets and meteorites

Is it just the succession?

The confusing juxtaposition between the end of one life

and the continuation of another?

The stars are supposed to be constant

yet they fall and they fade and they die

and nobody understands,

nobody explains why.

Maybe it’s not the fault in our stars

that throws us off our tightropes

Maybe each supernova

reminds us that we’re each a little infinity

and some infinities are bigger than other infinities

Stars fall and fade and die

but each supernova gives birth to something new

With each piece from the fallen stars,

we create an order out of the chaos

embracing the infinite

No safety net is needed

because our hearts are our wings

Love, the fuel that propels us to fly

You can take the stars out of the sky

but you can never take the sky itself

With love, we send a kiss out to the stars

Creating tiny pieces of light that shine in the dark

Poetry

writing

national poetry month

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