Cheyenne,

I am not attacking you, so please do not judge this poem. I am simply deticating this poem to you, for I understand how it relates to your beliefs. Hopefully you'll understand, too, and take the message into consideration. I love you. You know that.

Not everyone experiences joy, but we are familiar with sorrow. Isolating yourself is not a good idea, no matter how much you think it is. Don't be so confident. Your sorrows pierce deep through the bone. Let your grief flow with those of others.

To me, he is saying that we can't isolate ourselves... that everything that we feel, other people feel as well. We affect each other, and pretending that we don't is a false illusion, born of pride and overconfidence.

Emotion is never a singular experience, and what happens to one affects another. We can share sorrow and perhaps we need to in order to cope with it.

~Kayla Mae

Any Human To Another

Countee Cullen

The ills I sorrow at
Not me alone
Like an arrow,
Pierce to the marrow,
Through the fat
And past the bone.

Your grief and mine
Must intertwine
Like sea and river,
Be fused and mingle,
Diverse yet single,
Forever and forever.

Let no man be so proud
And confident,
To think he is allowed
A little tent
Pitched in a meadow
Of sun and shadow
All his little own.

Joy may be shy, unique,
Friendly to a few,
Sorrow never scorned to speak
To any who
Were false or true.

Your very grief
Like a blade
Shining and unsheathed
Must strike me down.
Of bitter aloes wreathed,
My sorrow must be laid
On your head like a crown.