Young Writers Society

text:
sometimes in re-reading my poetry
i get a sense of de-ja-vu and feel memory in my finger-tips
tracing words against the aged-paper of my grandfather’s German Bible,
hoping like Braille every crease in the page might tell me who he was,
or maybe who i am. what does this scrawl beside the Psalms
have to do with God, or me, did he intend this thought to be a letter,
because surely words can’t be only words if they are preserved
and what in the world could i have meant by leaving myself all these
stray slips of half-written lines and unresolved endings
who do you think you are; i ask
and write, and write.

Text:
i am afraid
of many waters, and skies, and fields between
i have often discovered egg-shells where my ribs should be
and i don’t trust the sun, or the moon, or even the day to turn;
but i can’t fathom what makes some people {you}
so afraid to love
except to imagine
that one day they must have inspected their feathered-hearts
and found only hollow air where wings were meant to be
and decided the sky
could never be worth
the risk of flight.

Text:
You: a helpfully generic pronoun
to help with the forgetting.
where are {you}
wandering around my mind in all this unspokeneness?

were: speaking
in past-tense
sounds so conclusive doesn’t it?
life rarely resembles art because it’s always moving forward or somewhere or -

easy: like
letting
the sun
rest
over
your
skin
on a summer day

like laughing at the sound of your own laughter

like our paths were probably supposed to be intertwined
but maybe that’s it.

to listen to: i still wonder
what the sparrows would have sung about us if i had known you in spring.

listening is simple – the river trickles winding against the rocks she knows where she is going - & she will not be stopped by anyone.

and - & i would have so liked for something more to have been said – &
i have things to say - &
i want to give you back some of these pieces of sea glass - &
isn’t there something terrible about how if you find the edge of the world the only way to know you’re there is to fall. &-
i wish this wasn’t it.

hard: i would not
jump off a bridge
for you – because
i know very well that you don’t know how to swim - & yet you’re always diving.

at some point
even the birds rest from their singing - & there is nothing left to say.

this feels like a paper crane that has
been folded inside out.

to hear: me
or pretend my voice is just
the wind against the leaves.

maybe that’s all this is.

i wish i would have kept a handful of dandelion petals - or sunbeams – or anything beautiful - pressed into some book to
remember another time.

because words are easy to write,
hard to read, & - all mixed up

Text:
“Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home?” (A Survey Conducted by the Pew Research Center)
As a nation [i am] restless and rootless. [800 miles is too far to walk on foot unless you run – and I’ve been running as long as I can remember]
In the Midwest, nearly half of adult residents say they have spent their entire lives in their hometown. Among all respondents to the Pew Research Center survey, 57% say they have not lived in the U.S. outside their current state. [I would be content to live inside the winding edge of a seashell, or the top limb of a spruce tree, careening off the edge of the Appalachians if I knew I could be closer – but I am not the maker of my plans, nor the captain of my ship, nor the designer of fate – so I am where I am supposed to be, but always too far away]
[M]oving is [a necessary (evil) tendency of the tide to sweep back the sand and sigh as the sun turns; but I imagine it is this broken-edged wandering which causes some of the fish the lose their minds] difficult to coordinate.
Home means different things to different people [a wedge of land between the river and the sun, a pink flowering tree my father planted, a mulberry-harvest summer, a return-address marked in my grand-father’s handwriting that i have etched into my memory even though we’ve never met, and this endless loop of leaving] [searching; planting; hoping] [the promise: to return].
Most stayers say at least half a dozen members of their extended families live within an hour’s drive; for 40%, more than 10 relatives live nearby.[…] Most movers have five or fewer extended-family members living within an hour’s drive of them, and 26% have none [the Pew Research Center can not account for the variable of ghosts, nor does this statistic accurately depict how loneliness becomes infinite after a certain time & distance].

Text:
the sun rests easy on the river-valley
and my heart is somewhere caught turning over hill bluffs. I can hear the bird song – and she seems to sing to me.
my mother’s father is born here.
and so is she.
and so am i (birthing is a process only understood in present-tense)
because from this land, life is always springing new.
and for that reason, at times
i believe i am also the river
as my grandfather was, and my mother, and the bird, and the tree, and the sun settling low now behind the valley.
every root growing evermore entangled into my veins, and i can hear my voice singing –
and it seems i sing for her; the earth, or for me, or maybe i’m the river again.
and the day is turning, as if to breathe, and i am alive.

Text:i still know the coordinates of every home i’ve ever left; while you have been engraving letters in trees, the spruces have been engraving their roots into the creases of my hands, and the lines under my eyes, the river water’s been folding over my feet until they become soft like sea-glass, the cicadas have burrowed into my lungs and crackle out when i breathe too deeply.

text:
i am
slowly falling
out of step
with the ways seasons pass here,
and
i pray
when it is time for summer’s end
and autumn’s soft return
that i won’t try to hold
the sun
in place

I made it to 30! :') and I do really plan to return. Thank you to those who read along, or who read later, especially thank you to Mesh & Lim for following along the whole way ~ this was a sort of quiet napo year for everyone, so I was glad to know someone was reading along. I will write some more napo reflections on my wall or something later ~ but for now... I actually have to get some other work done, whoops!

the pictures / doodles are all mine again - the feather I actually drew for my Covid-napo two years ago so even though it's a doodle it has ~ sentimental~ value too and should serve as a visual cue to that poetry. :')


text:
i am placing a feather here

to remind myself to return tomorrow
because there is more i have to say
and more i have to be than these folded wings
and drowning dreams

and some anchors are heavy,
like love-lost, or homes-left, or hopes-fallen
but some are bookmarks and bridges and
weights kept on boats so they don't get lost out at sea
and the little piece of me that takes everywhere
i've been to where i am going, so i know who i am,

(and who God is, and where home is
for when it is time to return)

this is the edge of life that is folded over and over and over again creased at the seams, and even after all these years
the seams won't rub smooth

this is the space between the sunset and nightfall
when you wonder if the stars or the fireflies will remember where you are

this is the weight you don't leave, the roots you can not unbind,
because they are tied too closely to where your heartstrings lie.

not me reading instead of counting, but anyway I just particularly love this line from the Pew Research Center poem (which I also love more generally, along with the ocean and river and bird imagery throughout):

the Pew Research Center can not account for the variable of ghosts, nor does this statistic accurately depict how loneliness becomes infinite after a certain time & distance