38. A Preface to My Poetry; for my mother (a series of haikus)
some days i tell my mother about the poetry i'm writing, and i worry she sees only birds, where i drew us flying
Spoiler! :
Because of this whole chapbook competition I've been in I finally kind of admitted to the world I write poetry. This has prompted several people to ask to see my writing and I feels a wierd sense of oversharing, vulnerability, & anxiety about it - almost like I need to justify not just what I've written, but however they interpret it. I've been reflecting a bit on the difference between private and public poetry, and now am grappling with how to merge these two important aspects of my life together. This poem is me sort of thinking through some of that.
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
Author's Note: Just like last year, and the year before, I'm ending my NaPo with a poem that uses at least one word from every person's NaPo thread title as my little tribute to all of you! Also unintentionally I am ending with 39 poems as I somehow also did last year, so might need to come back in May to do a little epilogue.
April rings differently this year, echoing off key, for the first time in a generation, arriving late through slanted sunbeams, disconnected and wandering. But this is how life goes now, teetering between sickness and love, recalling what is still essential and remembering how we're all connected in these choices and snapshots of life, despite feeling we are stranded somewhere lost at sea, despite the distance, distraction, dissociation, we have chosen discourse here, to dabble, and drabble in poetry.
April doesn't feel like spring this year, or living new life, or resurrection, even though we keep looking, and asking where the gods are keeping it, but they say nothing can stop the eventuality of seasons changing and spring waits for no one, so it's still national poetry month, and we're turning this cluster of poems, these scattered sticky notes posted to golden canvasses into life, painting the ashes torn right from the hearth and the whisper of cigarette smoke into living bird calls, pinning the leaves back to the rowan trees and claiming every star dropped from the sky, because whether or not the world's ending we'll write a new spring into existence, we've decided to do this.
But how does one write poetry in a pandemic, when it feels like tacenda, little picayune snippets, when these words feel weightless against these fears no longer faceless? Maybe we start out right where we are, wherever life has come to revolve, we record a transcript of the life of an american teenager juxtaposed to Caesar and Rumpelstiltskin, weathered, yes, but still standing somehow until we meet again or until that last warring star dies, we wake up at 3 am even though we should be sleeping, and we record what's on our heart, we retell our favorite fairy tales how they were meant to be heard, we'll have a chat with the bees, and try to tell them everything, and when they don't want to hear us, we write it down again just to be included in something as simple as a month of counting metre, writing loose poetic fan fics, or wedging your memories between cheap software forum spam, hoping it's not too late.
You know what, i swear i may have lost by mind along the way, but maybe this heart-willed soul-dumping into NaPo forums, is more significant than just words retrieved wrinkled and unedited, this naming of everything that's happened, and everything we feel, is not insignificant, after all there is power in boulders and power in silk, and the human language is one of the only things that doesn't decay, these ghost threads are going to be here whenever spring decides to show up, this computer ink has become blood, become growing tree roots, has lived in song and dance, you know history is as much written in hurried poetry, as in textbooks, and some day when there's time for peace, we might appreciate how this tender self lived on, how poetry revealed what we were looking for, how we dared to imagine in the end this April, that words might mean something for the world.
Huge thank you to everyone of you that encouraged me this month with your comments, likes, prompts, or chats during poetry jams. I am so very very appreciative of you!
Note I revised the poem on 5/10 because I re-read it and realized I had left out several titles somehow? So hopefully everyone's in there now [sorry I think I might have mixed up my lists a bit in midst of copy-pasting].
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
Congratulations for 39 poems this NaPo, @alliyah! I absolutely adore the confident, thoughtful poetic voice you've developed over this past month, as well as how you've unified everything nicely with the bird motif <3 Your haiku series is relatable to the reader, yet also distinctly 'you', if that makes sense, and I love the 39th poem - it's so heartwarming.
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