Flare of the night,

Hear your battle cry

Throw your torches to the sky

Run blindly through the forest of age

Careful not to set it ablaze

They see your approach

When you only look like moving sparks,

Forever closer in the dark

Fear boils up within them

And then anger at your further flight

Bows and arrows wheel blindly

Some brave souls fall at the foot of the trees

And then, together, the two groups meet

Shock on their faces, tears of surprise

The brother tribe stands face to face

Killed half of each other,

Suppressed by their quick mistake

They trudge home

Shoulder to shoulder

Carrying the wounded

And those never to wake

Women cry out

At their arrival

And the sky lets out a wail of thunder

This poem could mean a lot of things to different people, so please, take a moment to reflect on it and think what it means before I tell you. There is no wrong or right answer, because everyone will have a different way of seeing it. (Note also: My mom thought that this was a civil war poem. I wrote it, and it is meant to be a complete metaphor filled with smaller metaphors. I will attempt to explain some of the metaphors below.)

This is definitely a harder poem for me to explain because it is chock full of metaphors. A lot of it is about being judgmental and accepting people's differences and coming to realize that someone different from you may be trying to reach the same place as you but in a different boat. It is about not arguing or fighting with your peers, with the people that are with you along the way because "Anger is like taking a poison and hoping that the other person dies."  Anger and arguments truly do make your self worse off than it was before, so why argue? Often people still feel the same way about something as you do but go about it in a different way. This can definitely relate to natural and normal horsemanship- Normal horsemen may not be as effective as communicating with their horses, but their communication skills or the lack of them does not mean that they would love their horse any less than you or I do. How then can you judge their way of doing things if they are trying to love and do excellent things with their horses in the best way they know how?

Judging people and becoming angry or ignoring others is often destructive to both you and the other people. This is where the two tribal groups go at each other viciously, only to figure out that they are "brother tribes" and realize that they have made a great mistake and done much damage. Someone that you get angry at or dismiss from your acceptance of their being will be hurt- and consequently, so will you. Negative emotions, whether or not aimed at others, still burn you as well. If you hold the fire ball to throw it at them, then your arm will be burnt as well. The bigger your fireball gets, the more you will be burnt and the more they will as well. They eventually help each other carry their injured and deceased back to the villages- but by this time the damage is done, the lives are lost, the families are broken. When they get back from their battle, the women are crying, sobbing even- some because they see that their man is hurt, some because they see that their man is dead, and some because they see that their man is alive but know that their fellow women and men are hurting. The women who are secretly rejoicing for their husband's well being are also ashamed of their rejoice- because they know that their friends and sisters and cousins have lost theirs, or that there are still men in pain. Anger and judgment are both very destructive things, and whether we realize it or not, we can set fire to both the lives of others and your own life. It upsets the order of everything.

I hope that none of you judge people to extremely, and I hope that you are not very angry souls. Anger and judging are both very poisonous things, very terrible things, and can only be solved by you. I challenge you to step into tomorrow with a brighter face and determination to not set things off, to be peaceful with the people around you, and to attempt to find peace within yourself. Often it takes many steps to find peace within yourself- but you may feel a bit more peaceful just by doing this.