Life Poem by Jeremy Nel

Isn’t it strange, how we are born without instinct to survive?
How we can drift through life without the skills
Needed to cope with the needs that drive
Our lives as we are put through the mill
Of life.

Isn’t it strange how we can talk endlessly?
Yet say nothing?
How we can drift aimlessly
With such dazzling aplomb, waiting
To live life.

Why was nature so cruel we often fuss,
We have not the skills, nor oft the desire it seems
Tho the ability to acquire the knowledge abounds in us
As despite ourselves our cranium capacity teems
With the ability to live life.

Yet we who dare to grow our mind
Can acquire the skills to avoid the aimless drift
Of those in the mainstream of humankind
Who are so skilled at avoiding the thirst
For knowledge of life.

How lonely life becomes when cut loose from the flotsam
Of the swirling masses who float away
On the river of despair in the mainstream of debris
Yet how uplifting to acquire the strength and the power that is the mainstay
Of those who know life.

The new found power to bear the loneliness
Uplifts the spirit now free from the support tendency,
As needed by the masses who require the approval of their every weakness
For their survival depends on the approval dependency
Of those least equipped to live life.

How easy it now becomes to bear the loneliness
With the freeborn spirit that now uplifts
And banishes the negativeness
That the driftwood lifelessness instils
And renews with vigour the love of life.

Is this what Christians mean by being newborn?
This newfound spirit of freedom and upliftment?
Of being independent and lack of need being the norm
Of this new life, this new form, this new enactment
Of life renewed.