Everyone Carries Their Own Legend Inside Poem by Patti Masterman

everyone carries their own legend inside,
their mythos of how the world was saved, only within them;
within their abiding presence, that cured the deficiencies,
and because, having lived them out one by one, that through them
and us; and because in our day we dared life to do its worst,
as our rumored footsteps grew longer, wider and farther apart,
and our voices, which must carry that much farther
to oppose the towering waves, must rise much higher above
and through all of which, we never ceased in our existing;
not once, against the immense planetary forces ever straining
to return us to nothingness, again and again
and because our moist breath made us more powerful
than Greek gods, more enduring than granite scarp,
harder to move, once set in our deft determination,
and muscles more sinewy, under sleek countenance
the rarest beauty, most fabled fleshly hewn cheeks,
and of hands busily saluting the world, with gestures encoded
which would reveal us in our full glory only later,
and that our busy feet walked carefully along love's fragile contours
in sensitive, well metered condolences of the day,
and as all this was begun first by sitting up, then by crawling;
pulling up our once paltry weight, to make a stand for small things first,
and near the end of life running head on, shouting
Into the world's baffling bulk, our iron heads
battering against it's prehensile strength,
against the steel mast of our inchoate differences: all of this,
that the sun not set down it's oblivion mark,
before we have set out our own signposts
for others to see, as they begin writing
their own sagas, and themselves begin anew
the process of becoming immortal.