If only I had known
He had always
had an insatiable hunger for knowledge.
“Knew I
all”, thought he,
“I would be so
satisfied.”
A constant
feeling of incompleteness had plagued him
for as long
as he could remember.
He sat in his
rocking chair on this cold November evening,
contemplating
the memories and choices he had made,
as he was
about to reach the end of the road.
His mind
wandered about in his memories of his younger days.
Oh, how eager
he was
to learn it
all.
He spent his
entire youth buried in stacks of books,
setting aside
everything else.
Until one
day, the most beautiful woman approached him.
She made him
as happy as a man could possibly be.
But his
hunger for knowledge pushed her away.
He continued
to bury himself in books and new challenges.
And he broke
her heart.
Still unsatisfied,
he eagerly
sought to expand his knowledge,
isolating his
incomplete self,
hoping to
finally learn it all and to fill the void within him.
But the void
was never filled, his hunger never cured.
It only expanded,
day by day.
He took a
deep breath and brushed a tear away from his cheek.
“If only I
had known”, thought he,
“that she,
and only she,
could have cured
my chronic sense of incompleteness,
and could
have filled the void.”
He sighed, and
suddenly felt a euphoric wave overcome him.
He felt
complete. As if his hunger had finally been cured,
and he
reached the end of the road.
I like that you chose to not rhyme and instead seemed to focus on having the stanzas sound good individually.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good and effective backwards phrase. The poem would perhaps have been structurally sounder if he had used it again in the final stanza when he has his flash of insight. You could give it a go in a revision...
ReplyDeleteI like how you have build this whole story around the backwards phrase, you can really tell that it is the heart of the poem which has inspired this thought provoking journey for the narrator.
ReplyDeleteI really like this story and the message within, which (in my opinion) is greed and that people want more and more and yet somehow more is never enough, but people really need people because we a gregarious animals who need each other in order to survive and no material gains or endless amounts of knowledge can ever fill that void. So I like that there is a moral in the story, and therefore something to consider after you read the story.
ReplyDelete