Young Writers Society

2017: Inkstand Musings

Table of Contents



I would love to see how my poetry improves this April; I haven't poeted for a long time.

1. a walk under the whispering trees

Tell me what you hear
when you step out of your car and into the forest.
Tell me about the sunlight mottled green, the smell of earth and trees and
all the good things we lost
when we decided to run till the landscape blurred.

I will be waiting for you
in a place where oaks do not tower above the land,
where willows do not hide their weeping with their crinkly leaves.
And after I have drunk in all your words,
I will ask you what I have always asked:
Did the trees and the wind whisper a story,
one whose roots dug all the way back to
when the world was new?

Perhaps you will say yes this time.

2. realms apart

Tales always unlock
the hearts of lives they tell,
sometimes even till I can recognize them
even if they are turned inside out.
I would love to clap my hands
against their hands and tell them,
I know you even though you are realms away.

It is just that some wishes are as wispy as fading dreams,
because they are in a place
both too near and too far
for me to reach.

Sometimes the only way to know a tree
is to cut it down and count its rings.
Yet by the time I understood
every word and thought inscribed in its being,
it had crossed a bridge and left me
standing in its wake.

I wrote a message to the tree,
on paper in the hopes that my words
would pierce through a bit of its soul.
The echoes haunting me later is a reminder
of how futile it is
to whisper into the ear of someone you once loved.

Your poetry is so cool and mysterious and I love it!

Thank you @snowmonkey9 <3

3. when spring is only a breath away

I am licking my lips to try to relive the memories of spring:
of the rain spattering over us
of the birdsong trilling the birth of new leaves and flowers
of the puddles splashing its presence into being.

We all yearn to feel the aches
of a body slowly recovering from past hurts
embedded deep in our veins.

But the cold is always numbing them in a frosty hug
(and makes us forget both pleasure and pain);
we must cling on to what we remember while it lasts.

It is something wondrous
to wake up on a spring morning
and kiss the chilly breezes
and smile at the earth.

(It is always peeking out
at us from the rain puddles.
We will be all together, united even with
the drops of sweat from the sky.)

4. some sort of golden era

I am apt to believe that we are in
some sort of golden era:

the world we live in is a mosaic
metal shaped into our servants,
knowledge compiled and sorted out
till it defies the fickleness of fortunetelling,
faces aglow with the light from screens
and the chance to see each other without touching.

Yet, outside,
a stray weed can make its home
in a crevice of a road.
A tree can crack the tiles in my yard.
Ivy throttles a wall in its leafed grip.

5. a short blossoming

It seems only yesterday
that my favorite pink flowers
were bobbing on the bush—

(remember the way we used
to toss the pillows back and forth lightly
as wind-tossed dandelion seeds, dear friend?)

—but this dew-sprinkled morning
when I visited my flower patch,
all had wilted and closed its eyes to me.

Its beauty lasts as long as
the wonderful, lingering dampness of rain
that ascends to the heavens
soon after a rainbow thrusts itself in the sky.

(Tell me, friend,
what is it like up there?)

Ooooh <3 That last one is so soft and warm and makes me smile, the voice here of an old friend and the love expressed in such lilting lines ~

to toss the pillows back and forth lightly
as wind-tossed dandelion seeds, dear friend?)

I love it!!

Thank you @Audy

6. I am not meant to be the sun

You, golden one, are the sun
glimmering past the place I thought was the limits.

I am a blade of grass
striving to leave a mark in this world
and I know there are many like me.
(We stand in clumps and send secrets
to each other with rhizomes.)

A secret I have never told anyone:
I ache to stand taller and taller and taller
and glow with my own light like you do,
wake the world again and feed us heady wine.

There is nothing easier than pretending
that I can tumble all my contents out
and replace them with what I hope is sunlight,
but soaking in too much of it scorches me
from both the inside
(for too much antidote can turn into poison)
and the outside
(for sunbathing too long leads to sunburns).

One morning, though,
I saw a new shoot saluting the world
and I tipped it some dew for a week.
(It is taller than I now).