The lantern | Teen Ink

The lantern

February 23, 2015
By Valor GOLD, Hawthorne, California
Valor GOLD, Hawthorne, California
15 articles 0 photos 2 comments

Favorite Quote:
&ldquo;Look again at that dot. That&#039;s here. That&#039;s home. That&#039;s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every &quot;superstar,&quot; every &quot;supreme leader,&quot; every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.<br /> <br /> The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.<br /> <br /> Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.<br /> <br /> The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.<br /> <br /> It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we&#039;ve ever known.&rdquo; <br /> ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space



My daddy always held the lantern to the dark
to reveal that there wasn't a threat just the trees that rose high up into the heavens
He showed me the night sky and pointed to orion
He told me to be brave
when the howling started in the night he brought out the lantern like always
To show the wolves that came only for scraps not me
We traversed the road braving forward into the unknown
Fear not the night he told me
But I feared it more then anything
I feared the horrors that were not there
The things that lurked at the back of my mind
But it was not those that took my daddy
It was pestilence
He left me with one phrase
The darkest road you're going to face is your mind 
his chest stop lifting up in down in its erratic pattern
Now alone in the forest
I can hear the wolves, I can see the shapes of things that aren't there
But I brave onward into the unknown
uncertain of what was waiting in the deep dark.
but I do as my daddy told me



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