Cheers To You
Draft 1To those who find beauty in the rain
And the brave people who get up to try again May glasses clink to you and your optimism For those who refuse to waste breaths on people who are irrelevant Who praise and support loves ones in every event May your words of kindness echo back to you And those who seize the beautiful earth around you Just for the sake of admiring the gifts that lay below the sky so blue May the lenses through which you see the world bring you more insight The ones who don’t waste precious minutes on “the selfie” And reach their hands towards others when life gets messy May your selflessness and compassion be celebrated For those without a map, or sense of any plan Told by higher authority that they must find their plot of land Who see the fog, but have faith in the road that lies ahead Who do not fear the walk that others have not lead May you know that you do not dance this dance alone Those hungry people scraping their plates to know more Who see more than what’s on the surface and want to open closed doors May you pop champagne bottles for every discovery you make Cheers to you, for you’ve found the gold that everyone seeks You’ve discovered the path you must climb to get to the peak You’ve seized a day beyond what lies on an agenda page You’re a top performer, embracing the entire stage Cheers to you, grasping onto life so tight In hopes of holding on and finding that guiding light. Draft 2May glasses clink to you and your optimism
May your words of kindness echo back to you May the lenses through which you see the world bring you more insight May your selflessness and compassion be celebrated May you know that you do not dance this dance alone May you pop champagne bottles for every discovery you make Cheers to you, for grasping onto life so tight In hopes of holding on and finding that guiding light. Draft 3To those who find beauty in the rain
And the brave people who get up to try again For those who refuse to waste breaths on people who are irrelevant Who praise and support loves ones in every event And those who seize the beautiful earth around you Just for the sake of admiring the gifts that lay below the sky so blue The ones who don’t waste precious minutes on “the selfie” And reach their hands towards others when life gets messy For those without a map, or sense of any plan Told by higher authority that they must find their plot of land Who see the fog, but have faith in the road that lies ahead Who do not fear the walk that others have not lead Those hungry people scraping their plates to know more Who see more than what’s on the surface and want to open closed doors Cheers to you, for you’ve found the gold that everyone seeks You’ve discovered the path you must climb to get to the peak You’ve seized a day beyond what lies on an agenda page You’re a top performer, embracing the entire stage Draft 4To those who find beauty in the rain,
And see the water droplets the sky sends down As liquid jewels falling from the sky. To those who seize the beautiful earth around you And all the creatures and critters it brings about. Who can fall in love with everything under the sky. The ones who don’t waste precious minutes on “the selfie” But turns the attention on those whose hands are Stretched for help, seeking a hug or a dollar. For those without a map, or sense of any plan Just remember that someone first thought the world was flat So for now, you’re good. Those hungry people scraping their plates to know more Whether they be hungry for food or for knowledge. Cheers to you, for you’ve found the gold that everyone seeks You’ve discovered the path you must climb to get to the peak You’ve seized a day beyond what lies on an agenda page You’re a top performer, embracing the entire stage |
ERN Cheers to You was another one of the very first poems that I wrote in this class, and reading the first draft definitely supports it. Going back and looking on this draft, it sounds very Dr. Suess-esque. What I wanted to do was incorporate imagery of a toast, wedding, or honoring ceremony and honor the few people who actually do a decent job at living life. Unfortunately for me, it came out ridiculously cheesy and sounds very much like a nursery rhyme. An idea I had to revise this poem was perhaps separate the two ideas I am trying to mesh together, and have two separate versions of the poem.
For my first attempt to do this in draft two, I pretty much deleted everything from the poem except for the parts that began with “May…” and the last two lines of the original poem. I was going to add on to it right from the start, but in reading it, I thought it could suffice as a draft on its own. It very much reminds me of an Irish Prayer I once heard, but it is obviously different. It made me wonder if other people would think of this Irish Prayer (if they knew it) when they read this poem? I was studying in one class, how the intertextuality of two pieces greatly influence how you interpret them, and this poem along with the Irish Prayer made me think of their intertextuality. For this third revision, I did the opposite. I took out all of the parts that started with “May” and last two lines of the poem and kept everything else. The poem in this form is, how I was mentioning earlier, very cliché and sounds like it could be a sequel for “Oh The Places We’ll Go” by Doctor Suess. While I do like some of the lines that I have written here such as “The ones who don’t waste precious minutes on ‘selfies’”, the majority of them are cheesy too. This draft also does not provide as much concrete imagery as the draft before, this may be something to consider when revising the poem again. There is also not much of any devices being used in this poem with the exception of end rhyme. For the fourth revision, I simply added more lines to the preexisting lines in revision 3, This gave the lines more depth to them, which is what this poem was severely lacking. Just in the first stanza, the reader is made aware of the situation, and can even imagine the scene where this is taking place. This draft possesses more concrete imagery than its previous ones, but it’s still not enough to connect all of the dots and get a full image of what exactly is going on in this poem. Since the subject matter of this poem is not a specific person or location, this makes developing concrete images much harder than they would be if we were on a camera. |