When I was in elementary school they told us
\nto shoot for the moon and you will land among the stars
\nwhat I heard was that I should expect to fail
\nAnd so it was confusing to me when my mother got angry
\nwith me for failing to get the grades she set as the benchmark<\/p>\n
And so I was torn between these competing ideas
\nthat I was expected to perform and deliver on a high level
\nbut that I was to assume failure and reset expectations
\nThe longer I was caught between this hard place
\nthe more I allowed that confusion to turn the anger inward<\/p>\n
What had once felt like being caught by a rock
\nwould eventually become my crucible made my own hands
\ndetermined to burn away all impurities
\nBut what was eventually removed from this fire
\nwas not purified metal but the charred remains of a child\u2019s psyche<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was in elementary school they told us to shoot for the moon and you will land among the stars what I heard was that I should expect to fail And so it was confusing to me when my mother got angry with me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4906,5523,680,4880,5153],"class_list":["post-120041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","tag-2022fullmarathon","tag-2022hour19","tag-poetrymarathon","tag-2022-poetry-marathon","tag-thepoet_rajah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120065,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120041\/revisions\/120065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}