hubris (Photo credit: drtel)
Hubris
Is a seductive friend
Cleaves to you
To the bitter end
Flees from you
When you most depend
Battles lost
Nought left to defend
Hubris
Always blinds the eye
Over confident
So you hardly try
Believing that
You will still get by
Final moments
Leave you high and dry
Hubris
Your unconscious foe
Covers your tracks
Everywhere you go
Turns everyone
From a friend to foe
The Achilles Heel
You don’t even know
Hubris
Failure to recognise
Even you
Can’t guarantee the prize
Struggle-less
Don’t you realise?
Unless you learn
You will never rise
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
helenvalentina 
Oh this was great. I really liked the last two lines. It ended it perfectly.
Thank you so much!! 🙂
i agree with Greenembers, another great poem Helen 🙂
Thanks so much!! 🙂
Great rhythm!
Thank you so much!!:)
The rhyming is superb! And the content as well, beautiful job! Your talent is such an inspiration to me
Thank you so much, and ditto to you! 🙂
Hubris is occasionally a big battle for me. It is really interesting that I’m reading this today because I had a big conversation with myself about hubris today. My conversation with myself led me to the concept of humbleness. I think about humbleness a lot. It is really easy, sometimes, for me, for my ego to get out of check. So when it comes into my awareness that my ego has gotten out of check I try to focus on changing my behavior into humbleness. I have both an inferiority and superiority complex. So when I focus on humbleness and I have come down from superiority I begin to feel guilt and due to the guilt I keep myself below others (inferiority) and misconstrue that as something resembling humbleness. So my conversation with myself began with hubris and led to the semantics of what humbleness actually is. Humbleness is neither high nor low. Humbleness is the realization of being equal in value to everyone else and not using talents or successes as a way to elevate worth. I think that hubris and humbleness, superiority and inferiority are only issues when someone believes that who they are isn’t enough. It is something that I need to work on, letting go of anything limiting that I carry that makes me feel like I’m not enough and picking up the belief that I am enough. Thank you for writing on this subject, Helenvalentina. I continued my conversation with myself because you wrote about hubris. Besides being a great poet due to the topics that you write about your writing helps people. Thank you for helping me 🙂
Thank you, that is so kind and generous to say and to reflect further on the issue here. I wrote it about someone I know who never reaches their goals becaue they think they shouldn’t need to try. They give up at the first sign of difficulty or rejection because they can’t comprehend why it should happen, then think the world has cheated them when they don’t succeed. But you are very right re the inter-relationship of this to both superiority and inferioriy complexes and how we all battle with this in our lives. 🙂
I think that our relationships with people sometimes are walking, talking moral of the story stories. Why only commit yourself fully to what you want- well look at so and so, they inch forward and inch back and nothing seems to be working for them. The thing I love about poetry is that readers can take it to different places than the writer of the poem intended. I love reading your poetry helenvalentina 🙂
Thank you so much, that means a lot to me, I really appreciate your kind words! 🙂
I was looking up quotes for my blog and I found this quote and it reminded me of this conversation: “The road of life is strewn with the bodies of promising people. People who show promise, yet lack the confidence to act. People who make promises they are unable to keep. People who promise to do tomorrow what they could do today. Promising young stars, athletes, entrepreneurs who wait for promises to come true. Promise without a goal and a plan is like a barren cow. You know what she could do if she could do it, but she can’t. Turn your promise into a plan. Make no promise for tomorrow if you are able to keep it today. And if someone calls you promising, know that you are not doing enough today.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Color
Beautiful quote, thank you so much for sharing it! 🙂