A poet and I didn't know it

I love poetry and it was after this piece that I wrote for my travel writing class while studying abroad in London that I was first called a poet. Thanks Prof Brian! I just wanted to share with you all! I hope you enjoy this piece that means so much to me :)

Millions of people have walked the Bankside of London before us. They strolled along the river and down the same roads as we did January 26, 2016, a rainy Tuesday evening. Millions of people but who is remembered? Whose identity turns to landmarks? Which humans do we study and follow and awe at for centuries to come? A simple walk through Bankside, London brought up a not so simple idea that is the preservation of identity through history. Once dead, who disappears and who lives on? The contrast of this idea is unreal even on just one small speck of the globe, Bankside in London. Here, we have Shakespeare whose ridiculous fame and success grants him the preservation of his identity throughout centuries. His memory is timeless. We point out excitedly that we are looking at the building that once simply touched the building that Shakespeare had a drink occasionally. We listen eagerly for every small detail of what he did, who he hung out with, what he ate and where he shit and what he thought and where he had this thought and on and on.
And then we visited a graveyard. A majority of the buried were women who at a disgustingly young age were sold to a Bishop and given no purpose but to serve him. They were prostitutes of the Bishop and with that enslavement their identities were stripped long before being thrown into the graveyard. This is a graveyard where mass amounts of human beings were flung onto each other carelessly and unemotionally and with absolutely no identity attached. This is a place where the buried were deemed insignificant and their existence obsolete. Within a quarter mile from where we gushed over every detail of a single man’s life in Bankside we stood in front of a graveyard full of nameless prostitutes who barely lived into there twenties. Their lives were unstudied, names unknown and general existence deemed to nothingness compared to our beloved Shakespeare.
And yet, these women were just as much human beings. They were very much alive, full of feelings and emotions as Shakespeare once was. They lived in this same world as we do and Shakespeare did, and yet it is almost as if they did not exist at all. They are nameless and faceless and buried together carelessly by people who had no respect for their lives. If Shakespeare were buried in that plot of land, there would be no parking lot being put in over top of it. Most likely it would be a national treasure and a landmark because history has deemed his life more significant. So their identities were not preserved through history, as it was their identities were barely recognized during their lifetime.
Of course, it would be silly and naïve to think that every single living being could be remembered and respected the same. There are over seven billion people in the world living right now and most people will become a statistic the second they die and forgotten as a generation or two passes. Those whose identities are preserved throughout history are in the minority, which explains why we trip over each other to put a mark on this world in some way or another. We try so hard to leave behind a legacy. Human nature is to somehow become a Shakespeare. The biggest fear is to be thrown aside after death, forgotten soon thereafter, simply a memory to those close to you and nothing beyond their lifetimes.
So we walked together through the history of Bankside and then we drank. And no one will remember us that night. No one will remember where we walked, or what we said or where we drank or what we drank. The entirety of that class could have ceased to exist and it would have hardly affected anyone we encountered on that evening but that’s okay. As a group we laughed and learned and reflected. We supported an old pub together as we bought a round of drinks and we went home and no one will ever remember that we were there except for us, and that’s still okay.
Most of us fall somewhere in between the adored and honored Shakespeare and the nameless, faceless prostitutes. Most of us lead lives similar to every other person who has freely wandered the streets of Bankside. Most of our faces will not be recognized in the next century nor our names mentioned, but what’s important is that our lives are simply that. They are ours. We are so lucky because they are ours to make of it what we can. It will not matter where we ate or drank or shit or laughed. We are neither popular nor famous but we are not enslaved and the lives we touch will not be millions but it will be enough. As Shakespeare said himself, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”