The Corona of the Sun

The Corona of the Sun - Georgia Rae

A troubled heart,

unshaven, underfed.

Angels in the sky

making bets on his head.

Overworked, underpaid

and dancing with the odds,

morphing his makeup

to get in with the gods.

But chaos is catching

and spreads like disease,

"cough cough", went the sky

blowing cancer on the breeze.

Stinging their eyes,

they're all struggling to breathe.

It sparked an allergy so common,

that they blamed it on the bees.

A fearsome glow

has contorted what remains,

leaving the superhuman in the storm,

tongue out - awaiting acid rain.

You see, the malice of the monster doesn't matter anymore,

there was an internal glitch -

a missed stitch -

and the fabric of the world took strain and tore.

Now even the gods are tired and bored,

and nothing tastes quite like it did before.

He says, "Nothing tastes quite like it did before."

***

When you write - be it poetry or prose - you write with the inherent hope that people will understand what you are trying to say. You paint your word pictures and you outline your thoughts, you explore your narrative and you choose each word, metaphor and juxtaposition with surgical precision.

You have something to say. You have a message to share. Maybe it's a belief that you have, a conviction so strong, that it demands a physical presence on paper or plainly deserves an audience. Maybe it's a feeling you have in your gut, so joyful or so morose that you can't bear it. When you write these things down, describe them, glorify them and expand them, you free yourself from the notion that you have to experience these things alone. Then you share your writing. And as soon as you click that button and post that blog, article, review, poem, short story or opinion piece, you sit wide-eyed and agonizing over the very real possibility that whatever you wrote, is completely nonsensical to everybody but you.

"What if people completely misinterpret the meaning of my piece?" you fret.

"What if they can't see the garden, the one with the bees and the honeysuckle, in their minds eyes? If they can't picture that scene, the whole metaphor will be lost on them!" you moan self-pityingly.

The truth is, your readers probably will misinterpret you and your all encompassing metaphor might just get lost in translation. That is part of the conundrum that is subjective human consciousness. No matter how well we as writers explain, no matter how many adjectives we use or how clear a message seems to us, each reader will experience our writing differently. Some people will love it, some will hate it, some will understand it in their own way and some won't understand it at all. When you were in your high school English class, analysing poetry in preparation for your exams, did you ever wonder if that long-dead poet really intended his line about blue curtains to symbolise his depression and resentment for his mother, or if maybe he just wanted the curtains to be friggen blue?

This unpredictable, unavoidable issue of personal interpretation is unfortunately just as valid as the creative license used to create anything original in the first place! When you write, you write with the hope that people will understand, but also with the certain knowledge that they won't. That being said, just because something doesn't come across exactly how you had hoped it would, doesn't mean that it can't still be beautiful and impactful. In fact, because every reader understands the words in the context of their own perception, experience and horizon of reality, the messages that they take from a piece of writing will be all the more intimate and emphatic.

What is so interesting to me about this linguistic and psychological phenomenon is that it completely changes the structure of the traditional writer-to-reader relationship, where the writer provides the input and the reader does nothing but digest it. When our subjectivity is taken into account, it is suddenly clear that there is another step to the process! Something that is neither linear nor stationary - something that allows a piece of writing to evolve long after it is written and the ink has dried on the pages. Writing lives on through its readers never ending interpretations. By sharing our work with other people, we allow our messages to grow, and also perhaps to shrink along with the ideals of society, and to be either shouted from rooftops or whispered silently, always reflecting the times.

To me, this sort of metaphorical immortality of words, poems and prose is also a testament to the nature of our lives on this planet. From the first great philosophers, poets, scholars and playwrights to modern authors, anthropologists and creatives - there is a familiarity between the old and the new, themes of trials and tribulations, words describing suffering and hope and scenes depicting different takes on similar scenarios.

The Corona of the Sun, was originally about my own exploration of the world, its darkness and how like Pandora and her box, I could not regain innocence lost. However, to a friend of mine who read it, it was about how the pandemic has stopped the motor of the world and left her feeling strange and alien. To you, reading this now, it could mean something completely different, or even mean nothing at all. Either way, I think it's okay, and I would love to hear your interpretations!

***

By: Georgia Rae