By Atuhwera Daphine

What do we actually do with the brief time between being born and dying?

In To, Atuhwera Daphine reduces the enormous experience of human life to a sequence of simple actions. We learn, work, form friendships, fall in love, experience heartbreak, build families, encounter wealth and poverty, suffer and endure.

Yet after everything we spend a lifetime pursuing, gaining and surviving, the poem arrives at an unavoidable final reality: eventually, we leave it all behind.

To be alive.

To enjoy life.

To make friends.
To toil for a living.

To seek an education.
To love and be loved.

To love and get heartbroken.

To love and get married.
To marry and reproduce.

To hate and be hated.
To envy and be envied.
To enjoy all the riches.

To suffer through poverty.

To suffer with illnesses.

To endure so much.

And yet leave it all behind.

To die.

— Atuhwera Daphine