Ballad of Jim Casy | Teen Ink

Ballad of Jim Casy

April 19, 2009
By KICK3593 PLATINUM, Roslyn Heights, New York
KICK3593 PLATINUM, Roslyn Heights, New York
49 articles 0 photos 74 comments

(1)
If not for the blindness, my straight path may have stayed,
Admitting (to my convinced self) that nothing is for us
Under some white hovering sheet of extra godliness.
(2)
Yet so with my realized body did I mobilize by myself
And begin to stretch and lean sideways, though eventually
I found only my eyes open to myself walking
In yet again a straightness.
(3)
Forgotten of a beauty,
I sat in the shade without renewal.
Till you came along with your fresh new vigor,
I was with conclusion but no heralded skies above me.
Foresight put me to converge with you.
(4)
Further on do we fear the universe,
And corrugate for ourselves newly concerned declarations.
The waters were not same in another second,
But continuing with their movement, only so sure
That the next encounter, the stepping-stone
Ahead in misty mirages, will be new and unexpected, for the best.
(5)
Understand the cries, and you might form for yourself the new light,
The shard of god within you, contributing to surrounding puzzles,
That the skies, unmarked by scriptures, hold the patterns for you to diversify,
And for cons to find nurturing smoothness and the truth in their declared lies.
The anguishes, sorrows—only obscured later on—joys and happiness of people
Will be my nourishment.
I yet again stand in wilderness as before, but now with blanketing the miles of my surroundings.
(6)
My spirit no longer gathers, no longer yearns, nor recurs, but today I cure myself through others.


The author's comments:
I recently finished The Grapes of Wrath for my English class, and Jim Casy I believe is one of the most striking of characters. He reminded of myself for his mystified thoughts in the beginning and his self-questing for finding his own truth. With The Grapes of Wrath, we feel with the main characters, the Joad family, as they emerge from their torn-down, ruined rural lives to find the ominous, unfriendly, and anonymous character of the industrialized, yet still human world around them. Even though Casy is killed in the end, he still permeates the lives of the Joads, especially the main main hero Tom (enacted impressively by Henry Fonda in the John Ford adaptation). I want this poem to turn Casy's thoughts, universal, yet self-pondered, into an artist.

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