I Open My Eyes and am Frightened by What I See

I

I open my eyes and am frightened by what I see.

I don’t know where I am, and I can’t remember how I got here.

I squint my eyes, desperately seeking anything familiar in the foreign shadows.

I close them, count to three, and open them again,

But nothing has changed.

I continue to do this until days, weeks, months go by unnoticed,

And each time I open my eyes I am more startled than before.

I am confused, dazed, disoriented; my body shivers.

I frantically reach out into the darkness and expect you to rescue me;

You always rescue me.

But I cannot find your strong, comforting hand.

The cold air rushes between my fingers as they stretch out in desperation.

Eventually I give up; you aren’t coming.

And so I cry, cry, cry,

My sorrow screaming and reaching across the depths of this dark, empty land.

II
We used to be inseparable, you and I: two parts of a whole.

I could not feel my heart beat without feeling yours beat as well;

Your love flowed through my bloodstream, into my core,

Awakening and pumping life into my sleeping soul.

Your thoughts were my thoughts, and your voice was my voice.

I remember the way my eyes would tear up when your warm whispers tickled my ears.

You said you were delighted by me,

By me!

Oh, how I loved you.

I remember sitting on the beach with you,

Running my fingers through the sand and remembering your promises fulfilled.

I heard your breathing in the sound of waves flooding in and out over the shore;

The wind rustling through the evergreens was your quiet voice singing me a sweet 
    lullaby.

Your eyes sparkled in each sunset’s rays and the glow of heaven’s stars,

The touch of your hand was more familiar than my own mother’s.

Before my breath had time to whisper your name,

You were there.

My heart overflowed with gratitude and life!

Our hearts were intertwined like wild, unkempt garden vines;

You were everything to me.

III
But now your voice is distant, like the sound of a faint echo in a deep canyon;

I strain my ears but I cannot understand your words.

Did you see it coming? Did you try to warn me?

I cannot recall when it began, when our souls were torn apart.

One day I awoke and realized I forget what you look like when you laugh;

I can picture your face, like a still photograph, a moment frozen in time,

But I cannot make the memory come to life.

I cannot remember the tone of your chuckle or

The placement of the wrinkles at the corners of your eyes.

Time turned roaring flames to dying embers,

And I am left with a strange memory

Too clear to be a dream but too distant to be reality.

IV
I no longer know what is real and what is right.

I have given up my search for truth,

The closer I draw to what is real, the more distant your voice becomes.

I didn’t want this, you know;

Wasn’t it you who told me to

Love the poor, confront injustice, open my youthful eyes?

I thought I did this for you;

I thought this search for truth was in your name.

I look back at my old self and cringe at my naivety,

Trapped in a raging sea of fairy tales and deception.

Yet, I was certain you loved me, and I loved you back.

Now, I have found the shoreline and fought my way out of the sea of lies,

But you are nowhere in sight.

I thought knowing the truth would bring me closer to you,

But I have never felt so far.

Is it not possible to know both,

To see the oppression of a people, but still believe you remember them?

To witness the abuse of power, but believe you are in control?

To encounter hatred around every corner, but know your love can overcome it?

V
I no longer recognize the world I live in, the life I have.

I don’t know how to find you, which road to take;

Everything once familiar is now foreign.

Maybe I was destined to a life

Wandering this Road to Nowhere.

I shift from home to home, continent to continent,

But I am never comfortable, never content.

Suddenly I find myself numb to your joy and beauty

And instead feel the intense, stabbing pain of human suffering.

Numbness as submission, rejection, protection.

As my soul’s final attempt at being okay,

A survival mechanism.

I have drained my heart of too many feelings, my eyes of too many tears,

And the well is now drier than summers in the Sahara.

I try to believe you want me to find my way back to you,

But I don’t think I do.

I want to feel your love as I once did,

But sometimes I don’t believe I can.

You tell me everyone makes mistakes, that you still love me.

I don’t believe you; I am ashamed.

I look at the life-size dolls of perfection around me;

They are foolish, manicured, deceived,

But I secretly envy them.

The phrase “Ignorance is bliss” has never been truer.

I struggle to believe the one they love is the same one I love;

Is one a counterfeit, a conjuring of the imagination?

Maybe it was a dream, or maybe this is a dream;

Maybe I am the foolish one, and not they;

Maybe I am yet a child and my “reality” is only my silly imagination.

I am so lost and flawed,

All I want is to believe you love me anyway.

Please, Lord, show me this is true and

Believe me when I tell you my delicate heart cannot be broken

Again.

The pain of a goodbye

Even after my constant moving to and from and in between various places in the past few years, somehow goodbyes never get any easier for me. I get sad when I leave Hawaii after summers and Christmas, I cried when I left Yosemite after living there for 4 months, and I get very sentimental every time I leave my friends at APU. Though my semester in inner city LA was the most difficult time in my college life, the hardest part was saying goodbye to my little host sister. Now the time is coming and passing when I am having to say goodbye to Oxford and the people I have grown close to here. I know everyone hates goodbyes (to some extent), but they seem to be a lot more difficult for me than is typical. I tend to love people very easily and openly, and even if we are not necessarily "best friends" when it comes time to leave, I cannot help but simply dread the moment that inevitably comes when we part ways. It does not matter if we are best friends or close friends or even just roommates, I see beyond what the friendship is at that moment and see instead the potential for what it could have been. 

In the past few years, after studying abroad for 3 of my 6 semesters in college, I have really begun to understand just how realistic (or unrealistic) it is to maintain a long distance friendship. Friends I thought I was really close to when I left APU (or Hawaii or LA or High Sierra) simply would not make the effort to stay in touch. There were times in LA when, even though I was only a 35 minute car ride away from APU, I felt so disconnected from most friends at APU that I honestly might as well have been halfway around the world. Despite how hurtful it sometimes is and how much it forces me to question a lot of my friendships with people, it really does show you which friends care and are there long-term. It distinguishes those friends who will remember you and are willing to put actual effort into the friendship from those whose attention is dependent upon physical presence and whose biggest effort to stay in touch consists of a FB post once every few months. Excuses of having difficult classes, working extra hours, or doing extra curriculars have all come to sound the same to me. In reality, we're all busy, and I've come to discover that busyness is actually quite irrelevant in determining whether or not a person will stay in touch or put effort into maintaining a long distance friendship. You'll make time for those people you care about and want to make time for. And for the others, distance will likely cause you to simply forget. There are a few friends in my life who, after managing to put up with my study abroad addiction and life in the far off land of Hawai'i, I am actually very confident will be important people in my life for a long, long time. As hard as studying abroad continues to be on my friendships with people, it has made me so much more thankful for those certain friends who have consistently made an effort to stay strongly present in my life through it all. 

I think a lot of the anxiety and sadness I feel when saying goodbyes simply stems from the fact that I know when I say goodbye to many of these people, it really does mean goodbye. I've been forced to learn that not everyone stays in touch as they claim they will, and even with skype, facebook, and other technological inventions, distance really is one of the biggest challenges in a friendship. I don't think the day will ever come when I get better at goodbyes, but thank the Lord for people in my life who make it so difficult to say goodbye to.

A Last Glance

Goodbye…

Tears come streaming

And my lips start trembling;

I guess I always knew it had

To end.

Kimberley Winther
March 2011

"This is America"

I.


If a democracy puts power in the hands of the people,

America is not a democracy.

It is a place where Congressmen worth

Hundreds and millions of dollars

Vote more tax cuts of money that could have helped

The single mother, sickly child, or hungry worker.

 It is a nation whose leaders throw words like

Capitalism, Patriotism, Equalism

At its people and label the rest as

Socialism or COMMUNISM,

But really it is just greed and individualism.

It is a country where leaders distract the public

With thoughts of gay marriage and abortion

And avoid real issues of poverty, inequality, discrimination,

Shifting the public’s gaze from reality, and succeeding!

Suddenly the focus is on issues affecting some minority,

Instead of the systemic problems changing the lives of the 
      majority.

Everything in the name

Of money, power, fame;

That’s America for you.

II.

There is something wrong in a society where

Budget cuts take social programs from the poor

And leave untouched the excess of the rich.

I pledge allegiance to the Flag

Of the United States of America

Where everything must be made cheaper,

And consumers only get richer.

Fingerprints of India or China on every shirt and gadget;

These workers exploited, abused, used,

But no one cares because

Out of sight out of mind, right?

And to the Republic for which it stands

Accumulating wealth becomes an end in itself

Rather than a means to some societal good.

Overwhelming greed and individualism

In a nation marked by Christiandom.

One nation under God

Capitalism now a justification for inequality;

Racism and anti-migrationism

In this “melting pot” with its

Immigration foundation.

Indivisible

Equal opportunity promised in this nation

Where CEOs get richer, ignoring worker cares,

And half of our Congressmen are millionaires.

Sometimes I think I’m living in

A country of contradictions.

With liberty and justice for all.

III.

This country only one in two hundred,

A microscopic splotch on a map of the world;

One small piece, but we think it’s the whole.

Our vision of all else remains clouded,

And thoughts of others are hurled

Because compassion and understanding are not the goal.

Struggles in Libya or Egypt, no matter how urgent,

Are somehow made irrelevant.

IV.

We are like plastic dolls on a conveyor belt,

Emotion and pain unfelt,

Emerging from the factory that is America,

Cold and lifeless before they imprint data.

Uncle Sam furtively forming our minds

Through words and the media that blinds,

Having us believe we hold unique opinions,

But in reality we have no say in our decisions.

We are only plastic dolls;

Our inability and numbness appalls.

With Made in the USA stamped on our backs,

Uncaring of our actions and their impacts,

Clones of each other

Or, more accurately, of our political leaders.

Through the media, each person manufactured,

Each thought filtered

Of things like injustice and oppression,

Taught to respond but never to question.

Hearts beating, but never alive fully,

A prison of tamed souls in the land of the free.

Passion and wisdom not missed in their absence;

Oblivious to own ignorance and indifference.

None will accuse this country, where their ancestors dwelt.

Still just plastic dolls on a conveyor belt.

V.

Waiting for the scales to drop from your eyes;

Waiting, hoping, pleading, waiting,

But they never drop.

Left dwelling in some inauthentic existence,

Like abandoned matter

From some reckless child’s science experiment,

Threatened by screaming statistics

Of the discrepancies, inequalities, realities,

Only to forget them a moment later:

Forgetting as a method of protection.

Excuses handed to us

Like a lollipop handed to a child

To keep him from crying:

A distraction, deflection, deception.

Maybe tomorrow you will wake up

From this deep, deep slumber;

Maybe tomorrow you will ask questions

And find your own answers;

Then maybe this world will be a little better

And America will have some future.

Standing here

Dreaming and waiting for tomorrow,

But it never comes;

Tomorrow never comes.

By Kimberley Winther

February 2011

A poem inspired by W.H. Auden

“Souls Suffering on the Streets”

Souls suffering on the streets, passionately they weep;

Again we draw the curtains and drift to sleep,

Withholding any attempt to relieve some sorrow,

Always the excuse: tomorrow, tomorrow.

Stop your search for goodness: you won’t find it;

Don’t pray for God’s mercy: mankind is unfit;

Let the hatred, envy, and ignorance go on;

Individuality has become America’s icon.

Tell the homeless woman to stop hungering

And the abused child to stop whimpering;

There is no one to hear your cries;

That man was programmed to love is only a lie.

Heartbeats of humanity are deadened,

And the meaning of love has been cheapened;

God’s tears flood the earth in an anguished downpour;

Not a soul is alive anymore, anymore.

Week 3 Poem, inspired by D.H. Lawrence

Gone Fishing

I placed my fishing stick in the sea

On a warm, blue-skied day.

As I sat above and looked down into the

Other world, I saw him appear,

A blur at first, but steadily clearer.

He was stunning

With his swirls of

Yellow and turquoise and silver,

Admiring, craving the shrimp that slyly

Concealed the hook’s point.

On the far side of the bay,

The shore was sharp and the current strong.

The waves were furious,

Snapping against the rocks like a lion tamer’s

   whip.

But here, the waves sweetly

   caressed

And nurtured the trap, my trap,

Making a sweet cradle with its rolling ripples,

Seductively calling my prey closer.

The fish swam nearer and then

   farther

And then in circles, slowly and around,

Like a child’s merry-go-round

   he turned,

Stopping before the bait and watching,

Admiring it like a gluttonous man

Admires the cake he is about to devour.

But no attack.

Did he know?

Had he discovered my cleverly devised

   trap?

It is all in good fun;

I will, of course, not

   kill you.

I only want to admire your beauty,

Your shiny, capturing colors.

Then I will let you loose

And you will disappear into the deep, dark abyss

   Forever.

I close my eyes only to blink and,

Yes, a tug, a pull,

I’ve got you now!

How easy that was, I thought,

As I raised my stick

Up, up, up.

But what is this?

My bait is gone!

My hook is bare, shamefully

   exposed.

Curse you, fish!

You are nothing but a crook!

Stealing my bait

And surrendering nothing in return,

You are more cruel than the devil himself!

Stop tormenting me and

Bite the bait, the piercing hook.

Bite!

But it is no use,

He is gone, satisfied after his full

And tasty meal.

Thief.

You are too slimy, too cowardly

To bite and approach and face

   me,

Eye to eye, man to fish.

Well then! Have your fun now, because

I will be back

   tomorrow.

Hopkins-inspired poem

Part of my poetry assignment for my second week was to write a poem inspired by the great Gerard Manley Hopkins. So, here it is:

THE SEA

Nothing is so lovely as the sea—

Where above the sun rises and reddens and rests;

Dolphins dance atop rolling, rhythmic waves, and guests

Of a breathtaking ballet we be,

Gladly; as spoken song in baby’s bin softly

Moms sing, its liquid melodies these ears infests,

Stirring, soothing this heart, ignoring protests

With deep breathes out, in: the wave ashore breaks boldly.

Oh! How wondrous the crafter of such a creature!

By it faint echoes of Thy warm whisper beckons,

Like a church bell, my soul to its Savior.

Soft ripples turning and twirling awakens

My heart, drawing me nearer when too far I wander,

In His presence, largely my burden lessens.

Daydreaming

Listen . . .
Ocean rumblings
Fade into horns honking
And humans fussing; wake up! You're
Still here.

Azusa 101

This past week, from Thursday through Sunday, I went on a four day service-learning trip through the city of Azusa. The object of the Azusa 101 trip is to learn more about the social issues going on within the community and our role in it as APU students. We visited schools, non-profit organizations, churches, the police station, and other various places within the city of Azusa. We stayed with a family the first night and at a local church for the second and third night. It was such an amazing and enlightening experience. I gained such a different perspective on issues ranging from homelessness to the education system to immigration during this trip. I could not believe how much goes on in the city I have been living in for the past two years that I was unaware of. Here is a poem I wrote during and after the trip as a sort of reflection on my thoughts and experiences during Azusa 101. I am not completely satisfied with the poem, and at some point I will likely come back and make changes to it. But for now, here it is.

It’s Easy.

It is easy to voice your intense opposition
Of the law-breaking, foreign immigrant,
To insist on stricter laws in this nation
And across borders with little management,
Until you stare into the face of the man
Who has a family and no money for rent,
Who is shoved, abused, scammed, humiliated,
Desperate for work to provide for three children
But unable to pay the unaffordable fee for new documents,
He is thrown to the streets with his family, unliberated.

It is easy to rebuke the homosexual
For sinful, improper attractions
Which could not possibly be natural,
But choices, decisions, mutilations,
Until you look into the shamed boy’s eyes
Abhorred by his own feelings and life,
Desperate for acceptance and approval
But often the object of looks of despise,
Praying to God to be freed of this strife,
He is abandoned, condemned, left alone in battle.

It is easy to say racism is nonexistent,
A problem of other past communities,
That everyone has the chance to be content
In this land of equal opportunities,
Until you are told by a seven year old girl
That she’s not going to college because she’s brown,
Or the African-American teen
Towards whom hate crimes ruthlessly hurl,
Beautiful faces who, loveless, will drown,
Yet not reason enough to upset life’s routine.

It is easy to ignore these problems
And walk on past towards the American dream,
The white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and sparkling gems,
Money, fashion, power, a continuous stream.
But what about the hurting, helpless, oppressed?
How quickly backs are turned from their struggles,
So easy to continue life in ignorance of the hostility
In society, unwilling to sacrifice, protest,
Step up as God’s beloved, chosen peoples
And care even a little about this hurting humanity.

It is easy to push aside the statistics
Of poverty, homelessness, abuse, violence,
In a hurting world with a surplus of critics,
But no one willing to speak up amidst the silence,
Blind to the faces behind the numbers,
Outraged at increased taxes to relieve
The single, working mother with a sick daughter,
More concerned with my well-being than a stranger’s,
God crying for His children to act and believe
The solution is not violence, but mercy, love, laughter.

Wish Upon a Dream

I have stumbled across another poem I wrote while studying at High Sierra last Spring. Although I have always been such a logical minded person, I have come to discover there lies a dreamer within me. This poem is but a glimpse of this dreamer inside.


Standing in this vast and opportune world,
My mind ponders past hopes and future dreams
Wondering where my life will next be hurled,
And knowing what results is what God deems.
I look up and wish upon a lone star,
Asking for a life of love, beauty, joy;
More than the stars in the glorious sky
The dreams in my young and hopeful heart are,
Some live exposed while others remain coy,
And yet their presence I cannot deny.

Dreams both vast and small lay amidst my soul,
In hope of emerging and coming true;
Oh, beautiful, boundless dreams to console
And comfort victims in need of rescue,
To dance among flowers of the meadows
And to freely sing the tune of my heart,
To fill a dark world with laughter and love
And shoot the scorned with Cupid’s sharp arrows,
To speak the unspeakable through my art
And bring true delight to the King above.

Only through Him can these dreams be achieved,
And only through grace will this hope remain;
Will my heart’s desires soon be relieved?
And which dreams will I lose or retain
Here in a life that seems but a moment?
And so now I will continue twirling
Down the path that is narrow and straight
Grasping hope of dreams fulfilled, being patient
At this stage of not reaping, but sowing;
As for now, in this heart my dreams shall wait.

Time Will Not Remain Await

High Sierra, Spring 2009


Further distractions will soon captivate
These unfixed eyes and heart I lack in Thee.
Be not fooled, time will not remain await.

Hypnotized by meaningless things frustrate;
Unveil these eyes, allow me to see that
Further distractions will soon captivate.

Distracted and fruitless be not my fate;
Nothing to do, but always too busy,
Be not fooled, time will not remain await.

This way a helpless struggle to vacate,
Trying to stray from faults of history;
Further distractions will soon captivate.

Struggling to be rid of this excess weight
And know where life does so furtively flee.
Be not fooled, time will not remain await.

My mind says no, but my heart wills debate,
Fighting unceasingly till it is free;
Further distractions will soon captivate,
Be not fooled, time will not remain await.