Poetic 3

For my Walk Poem, I attempted to capture everything that the action of walking means to me. Walking has been a constant theme in my life, and so many of my best memories are of long walks through this city. Every walk recalls another walk as I’ve passed every street so many times before. I wanted to capture two atmospheres and two attitudes: that of a past walk and that of the present walk. Walking traditionally has connotations both of forward motion and of nostalgic exploration, and these themes are present in my poem as well. I did take an actual walk, but it wasn’t something I did for this assignment, as I honestly walk miles every weekend it’s nice out. As I walked, it became evident that it was impossible for me to write about walking without recalling all of my past experiences. I couldn’t only write about that single walk because I would have to exclude a lifetime.
Additionally, I wanted to explore two concepts that I feel linked to my concept of walking: that of life being a cyclical motion and the physicality of walking. I’ve learned that when a human being walks, they don’t actually move their leg up and then place their foot on the ground, but that the human body has been adapted to use the force of gravity to do half of the work for us. We lift our leg and let gravity push us down, catching ourselves at the last second. This is incredibly complex and to this day scientists find it difficult to build a robot that can successfully walk like a human does. I also envisioned life as if it were a globe, and instead of parallel universes or a linear timeline, I imagined my past and future selves walking along this sphere. And just how the Earth revolves constantly, our present selves will eventually revolve and reach these other planes of time, reaching forward and remembering simultaneously and always.