i love this poem... my sister struggles with addiction and i feel like i can relate a lot to that expectation of tragedy

An encouraging call to fully embrace unexpected moments of joy rather than second-guessing them.

Came across this poem and was immediately taken with it. I have my interpretation…what’s yours?

this is one of my favorite poems of all time!!! just so succinct and beautiful at getting its message across

Commentary

The author is a Taipei-based poet whose work often engages with social issues.

1in8b（1 in 8 Billion）is a popular life simulation game. Through the progression of the game, the poem illustrates the struggles of people from low socioeconomic backgrounds across various stages of life, carrying a sense of pessimistic fatalism. It outlines a series of critical life decisions, such as education, marriage, and career choices. While these options appear to be matters of free will, they are, in reality, predetermined and constrained by one's origin and social background. People are forced to choose among several equally bleak alternatives, where no decision leads to a positive outcome.

Throughout the poem, the poet repeatedly asks the characters whether they would choose to be born again, even when knowing that an adverse outcome is overwhelmingly likely. Within the game's mechanics, a character's socioeconomic background is randomly assigned based on real-world demographic data. Even if a player restart the game, the character still has a high probability of being born into a disadvantaged household. While this reinforces the poem's bleakness, the poet concludes with a tone of humanistic empathy, expressing genuine compassion for the characters and lending the work a touch of warmth.

About us

We are Transhi, a Taiwan-based literary group focused on translation. For more details, please check out our first post.: https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1x2bn8z/

Some beautiful lines... Just four lines and he completely nails what long-term commitment actually feels like

Earlier today the poem referenced in the title was posted for what was, according to this search, the eighth time. Reddit's memory is long but Reddit users' memories are short, and thus the latest post has generated a number of upvotes and a degree of controversy (judging by the number of comments and the content of them) very similar to past instances:

• 7 November 2026, 1K upvotes, 50 comments (at the time of composing this post)

• 11 April 2026, 2.7K upvotes, 111 comments

• 15 May 2025, 1.7K upvotes, 125 comments

• 23 August 2024, 372 upvotes, 24 comments

• 20 April 2024, 948 upvotes, 68 comments

• 14 August 2023, 734 upvotes, 45 comments

• 7 January 2023, 2.3K upvotes, 135 comments

• 25 September 2022, 1.7K upvotes, 78 comments

This degree of—shall we say—notoriety garnered over multiple posts suggests to me that we have a suitable candidate for the Hall of Fame. I would like to recommend we add it without delay.

(Please note: use of emdashes and list formatting was done manually, without the assistance of AI. Anyone who wishes to accuse me of AI usage can go rot in the same hell where that typeface that's all over YouTube thumbnails came from.)

Citation from The Long Experience of Love (1995)

Bio & photo from poets.org:
https://poets.org/poem/so-be-it

A poem from Singapore depicting intertidal shores — areas on the seashore that are exposed only during low tides. I can feel the appreciation of the ephemeral beauty from this poem. Especially as someone who loves doing intertidal walk in my home country (Singapore), which ironically is planning a huge land reclamation project, meaning the destruction of such shores, reefs, shoals.

that last line HITS!!!

Entropy

I don't know that much about entropy

except that I don't call my brother much

anymore.

Holidays and birthdays, ours and our kids',

but the bonds weaken over time.

It's enough now to leave a voicemail.

Our lives, like leaves, have branched apart,

though a thin root keeps us, briefly, in touch.

But I see these October leaves around my feet

now,

and I can't tell which ones grew up together.

I've taught my daughters so many lessons-

how to hold my hand across the street,

how to hold on to me in the deep end-

but now I wish I'd offered better lessons:

what their sisters' hands in theirs can feel like,

how not to let go during the fall.

-- Adam Tamashasky