Social Injustice Games for Change Poem By Jatin Gundara
May 24, 2022
CONGRATULATIONS! Your submission ‘Rising’ has been selected as a finalist in the 2022 G4C Student Challenge competition for the Fair Game Writing Challenge!

Thunder streaks through the dark clouds
With malicious intent.
A cacophony of nature
The work of a false god,
Resonates throughout the air.
Rising.

The souls of thousands
Rush upward
As a figure is carved
Out of the darkness.
Rising.

Just as all seems lost,
A beacon of light
Valiantly reveals
Itself below.
Forever,
Rising.

In the world below,
Darkness ravages the land.
History is doomed to repeat itself
As a great power will soon be awakened.

Light reaches through the darkness,
As the distant cliffs
Call for company.
A sinister procession is
Formed.
A procession soon broken by
The power of fate.

When journeying across
The world below,
That power envelops me.
The power of
Hate and
Friendship,
Dread and
Longing,
Weakness and
Strength,
Melancholy and
Joy,
Uselessness,

And Hope.

I feel it all with them.
Their different stories resonate
With different parts of me.

I am given a holistic view of myself as
I realize my being is not completely unitary.
No one’s is.
Our being is not singular,
But fragmented.

This realization has only come to
Me much later.
The excitement of the journey
Cleverly masked this truth
Until the end.

Finality is cheated
in this game.
Your emotions are toyed with
By him.

When the flames engulfed everything
in sight,
He was the one who sparked them.

When death ran through the river,
Ravaging all in it’s wake,
It was he who released it

And when the world was broken,
It was he who wielded the hammer.

When the beasts ravaged the land below,
It was he who drove them.

When friends were torn apart,
It was he who split them.

And wherever hope was spread,
He was there to crush it.

He,
The false god,
The leader of the procession,
The figure carved from the darkness,
The origin of nihilism and anarchy,
Cheated finality time and time again,
Until one day,

The seal of hate, dread, melancholy, and uselessness was finally broken.
The beacon of light penetrated the dark clouds which enveloped the sky as
A power was awakened.
Not one of darkness,
But of hope.

As the credits to this journey play,
It is easy to feel happy.
But a part of me still resonates with
Him.

A small part of my being still resonates with his.
We all have a little part of him in us.
A part of us that wants to cheat finality,
And let go.
A part of us which wants to live in
Our own personal fantasy.
The question is,
Do we choose to embrace it?