A Chasidic girl from America’s feel-good, trick-of-the mind poem has gone viral.
Chanie Gorkin, who is in 11th grade (year 12) at Beth Rivkah High School in Brooklyn wrote her poem - called “Worst Day Ever?” - for PoetryNation.com, an online poetry website, earlier this month. It subsequently made its way to the wall of a bar in North London, where London resident Ronnie Joice saw and posted it to social media.
But its journey did not end there.
It has since gone viral, spreading through social media (Joice's original tweet was retweeted over 400 times between it's posting on Wednesday and when this article was written on Friday *update: it had been retweeted over 2,500 times by Monday morning*)and publications on both sides of the pond have picked it up. It has also been translated in Hebrew, Russian, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Chinese.
The poem, which starts with the declaration “today was the absolute worst day ever”, appears to be a musing on an irredeemably sad moment in the life of the author.
But the seemingly depressing poem is transformed into an uplifting message when it is read from the bottom up.
Ms Gorkin originally wrote the poem as part of a school assignment, before posting it on the poetry website. Ms Gorkin’s class was told to write a poem about their worst day. However, Ms Gorkin looked at the task from the point of view of her Chasidic upbringing. Dena Gorkin, Chanie’s mother, explained that “One of the major tenets of Chasidic philosophy is that…there is God in everything, and it is part of our mission in life to look for the good, and to find it and to spread it.” So Ms Gorkin decided to turn the assignment on its head, and show that even on someone’s worst day, good can be found.
On his Facebook page, Ms Gorkin’s father, Baruch, described the reaction to the poem as “pretty amazing” and “very cool”.
— Ronnie Joice (@ronniejoice) July 22, 2015
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