Before They Were Night Vale: On Triumph (Patreon)

 Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our feature in which Night Vale creators Jeffrey and Joseph share writing from before their Welcome to Night Vale collaboration, along with commentary. Come explore their early writing, both good and bad.  

In 2011, my father died at the age of 56. This was about 6 months before I wrote the first paragraph of what would eventually become Night Vale. It would only be years later that I realized how much of early Night Vale was me dealing with the grief over my father.

This is a poem I wrote some years later, I don't remember how many. It's about the day we buried my father. I don't write poetry very much, but I think this one turned out pretty well. 

A warning that it is, as you might imagine for a poem about burying your father, a pretty intense one.

-Joseph

******

On Triumph

I watched some ants eat a june bug alive

as we stood around my father’s grave.

It climbed and climbed the same stalk of grass,

writhing, failing to escape,

so what do I know about pain?

And the pine tree nearby was bent nearly horizontal

by the wind that blows cold, daily, whistling off the ocean,

its uppermost branches mere feet from its roots,

so what do I know about giving up?

And anyway, those same ants were just then eating my father,

as was the tree, in its slumped, slower way.

So what I was seeing was not pain, but triumph.

Not a surrender, but a renegotiation of terms.

Everything is what it is, only phrased differently,

as death is just life phrased without us in it.