My Poetry Year: Entry #13

In which Your Humble Blogger demonstrates how much of a fantasy/sci-fi geek she can be (contain your surprise):

"Samwise Got It Right"

Although he was
Made to sound drunk and deflated
When he begged to share the load,
    good Sam had the right idea.
He wasn't, however, asking to help, but for help.
    He wasn't
Speaking to Frodo, but
Instead, to the willing, to us.

So we put down
Our worries and tired thoughts of chores,
And we stumbled after their thick feet up Mount Doom.
    Then? Well, we
Quested after Aslan, whittled Buffy's stakes,
    watched the Watchmen, and
Saw the Oceanic
Six safely onto the mainland.

And after the
Screen scrolled black into credits, or
The pages whispered shut, we knew our friends were home,
    in some sense,
And we were happy, though, like Locke,
    we had faith in the adventure
And would've liked to stay
In our best days on the island.

* * *

Yup, I watched a lot of Lost. This was written after the series finale. All stories ask their readers to take a journey of sorts with the characters, but I think that many more stories labeled "sci-fi" or "fantasy" depend on a literal or explicitly stated journey or quest. Beyond that, though, I don't think that fantasy or sci-fi have to be regarded on such a different level as capital-L, lofty pedestal Literature. It's just a question of how you like your journeys presented. :)

Goofy technical notes: One stanza for each book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the numbers from Lost play a role, too; check the number of syllables per line! Okay, so I had to fudge it a little. Fifteen- and sixteen-syllable lines were just too long, so those got broken up where it seemed to make sense to do so; that's where you see the indented lines. And lines that were twenty-three or forty-two syllables long were entirely impractical, so I multiplied 2 x 3 for a six-syllable line and 4 x 2 for an eight-syllable line.

No one believes me when I say I do this for fun!