A Personal Response to a Poem

http://www.lyricsmania.com/move_pen_move_lyrics_shane_koyczan.html

 Death is a force that we all have to face, but none of us are willing to see it through; our society invents things to elongate our life and postpone our death, but it is an inevitable force that will strike upon us all. There is no escaping it, we are all subject to it. “Move Pen Move” is a touching poem written by Shane Koyczan as a response to “Death Be Not Proud,” by John Donne, and describes the inevitability of death and our fruitless struggles to escape it. In the poem, Shane talks about his mother slowly dying, and how no matter the intensity of her sickness, she asked him to write for her, to speak poetry to her, to make her happy once more. Despite his belief that the skill of poetry was useless, she made him write more, but no matter how much he wrote, he could not save her.

This poem broke my heart when I read it because it shows the raw power of death, and how it affects people; he tried so hard to make his mother happy, to keep her alive, but no matter how much poetry he wrote, her life was still being pulled by death. Furthermore, the two of them had a long distance relationship and rarely ever saw each other, but rather simply wrote to each other.

Reading this poem made me remember a friend of mine that had died of cancer before he had even turned 12 because he did not deserve to die, he was an innocent boy. But no matter how much medication they put him on, no matter how much I tried to cheer him up, the cancer brought upon his death, and a friend was stolen from me.

In conclusion, this poem reminded me that death is an inevitable impending force that will consume us all; whether that death seems deserving or not, it will still come to us all. Death takes the people that we love away from us, and sometimes it is the escape that people look for, but, one by one, death will eventually take us all.