Getting to Know Yourself

This is my theme for English B. My poem is based off of a poem Langston Hughes wrote. This is a page with he original: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/English_B.html . This is my take on it including new ideas and things that fit this time period. I also replaced the Harlem Renaissance subject with a much smaller, more modern movement.



Sitting in the back of the room
Watching dozens of screens flash with words, pictures, and games
I watched as the instructor assigned a poem to be written
A poem about ourselves
A flurry of thoughts consumed my thoughtful mind

Me
What am I?
Who am I?
Do I know who I am, Does anyone?
How do I fill the blank screen before me?

This poem
This excuse for people to write about them selves
But how would they do it
Do they know themselves at all?

With minds unwilling to wander from the acceptance of mainstream society
How do they even begin to know who they are
Hollister can't tell them
American Eagle can't tell them
The hours with their friends on cell phones don't help either
Is there anything to them
Besides, what you can find in the next corporate advertisement know as a student?
This world
Our society
Brand names and products
The mannequins fill the seats of our schools
Is that who will fill the seats of corporate executives in the future?

Free thought dies in the lust for acceptance
This never ending journey to be just like everyone else renders a mind with emptiness
An emptiness that can not be filled
Except of course by more brands and more new STUFF
Is that all our society wants in life, stuff?
I, on the other hand, choose to be me
To be me and stay as me
Not changing to fit the wavering trends of the day
I invite you to do the same
To create an age of free thought and self discovery

Growing up in this age of materialism and thoughtlessness
Leaves an educated mind yearning for more
Yearning for the answers to questions most have never conceived
Yearning to know themselves
Knowing myself is knowing what I stand for

Staring into the empty sky
The pink sun sets over the barren ridge
Reflecting golden and magenta rays off of the unstirred lake
My two friends and I sit thoughtfully on the abandoned shore
Observing the rolling green hills and jagged peaks that surround the lake
We sit and talk in a very close, local way about big, global subjects
The rise of technology in this wayfaring society
It affects everyone, but is it in a good way?
In the never ending journey to discover the world online
Have we lost ourselves?
We forget our culture and make way for the global culture that technology provides
Walking this flat earth I search for the edge
The edge of the known and the edge of acceptance
What lies outside the know world?
Can there be anything else to know,
Or has pop-culture and technology already explored the boundaries of everything?

There remains one final frontier
Once inhabited by many people
But now it is no more
The population of the frontier dwindles as the world flattens
But where is this frontier you ask
Where can it be?
If it can't be found on Google Earth then it must not exist, right?
Wrong
It's something that everyone already has
Each and every one of us
We just have to find it
A new place to go and explore and find new unimaginable ideas
But what is it you ask?
Unsurprising, you may not know what I mean
Most people do not

This final frontier and the last unexplored place that lies within us all
It is in fact, yourself
Getting to know oneself in a world of high speed, global communications is hard
When getting to know everyone else is so simple
It is easy to often ignore ourselves
What do you stand for as an individual?
Not what your society stand for
The freedom of thought is often not exercised
There is no longer a need in our society
We all are submersed in distractions from reality
The reality of who we really are as an individual
I encourage you to get to know yourself
What exactly do you believe in and stand for?
Spend some time with yourself
Be it in nature, or even at home
Get to know yourself
And lose the labels of society