What is love except memory unbound, & what is faith except hearing the sound – of God standing close & the saints still all around.
I hear you in the hush of the wind I see your foot-prints when the tide moves the sand I know when I’m brave, there’s your hand
I believe so truly in heaven, because heaven believes fiercely in me & doesn’t the sun rise, & don’t the stars fill the night, how could you see it all & not believe in light? We are all one breath of eternity.
There seems to be a purpose in every thread, & all these loose-ends I can see it’s woven through a tapestry, unbroken - of how love doesn’t end, of how stories live on, how Spring will come again, & that maybe you aren’t far from here, because earth’s edge is not so far from heaven’s.
What is love except memory unbound, & what is faith except hearing the sound – of God standing close & the saints still all around.
This is a more faith-focused / song-version of poem 30, that I wrote after poem 30, and hopefully can do a recording of later.
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
--- 30. & all these loose-ends will bind into a net.
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this poem is inspired by my ancestry research, & is supposed to help the reader experience the feeling of not being able to read everything completely that comes with with reading old documents - sometimes I will have a letter or a census document that can not be read completely because the handwriting, or missing information, & it feels like you have to fill in the rest of what's happening in the gaps. it's also inspired by my great-grand-uncle Leslie, who I've written about in several poems and especially here: woven basket which I think is probably the most personally-meaningful poem I've written which in-part is about how the loose-ends people leave when they die, or in life, are a precious part of who we are.
In this poem too, I am aware you won't be able to read all the words. As said above, that's part of the point. But I will also place a plain text version below to read afterwards.
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
--- 30. & all these loose-ends will bind into a net. (plain text version)
Spoiler! :
TEXT: memory is awfully strange; how we ascribe meaning to all these stray loose-ends separated by time
there are so many unspoken things between then & now. I am not who I was. You are not the you that I keep holding in my memory.
life is similar to weaving a basket - over & under & back again; everything bound so tightly by threads that will always remain perpendicular
in the end it is the loose-ends that define us I suppose. all these unfinished conversations & unfinished stories sticking out - I don't know where they go.
some people believe our DNA carries memories across generations perhaps the loose-ends become tied in & resolved perhaps life is never made smooth.
I hear you in the hush of the wind in the grass
I imagine I can hear my ancestor's voices sometimes reminding me the harvest is almost ready; that the tide always turns; that love never ends.
& really, what is love except our unbound memory?
I believe so concretely in ghosts I suppose because they believe so fiercely in me. & doesn't the tide return each day, & the sun, & the moon, I see too many stars to only believe in the night.
I wonder sometimes when I am gone which edges memory will leave unbound - which places will all this light shine through.
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you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
Thank you to everyone who followed along with me during this National Poetry Writing Month, who liked, or read, or commented, or encouraged me in pads! This was a really different April for me since I had Holy Week, then my dad visiting me for a week, then a big life-thing-came-up, then I was traveling for a week, got really sick for two days, and by the time all that was over only had 5 days left of April. I had to write 22 poems in 5 days in order to manage to catch my goal, but I'm still pretty proud of how things turned out, and managed 77 comments in other people's threads.
The main themes of my threads seem to have turned out to be time, memory, and loose-ends. Might change up some formatting in some of these later, or add more if there's something that feels like it should be added. Thank you again for reading!
& see you next year.
alliyah
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
Word Cloud of this year's NaPo made by wordclouds.com
Random Stats Out of 31 poems...
My shortest poem had 1 word
In total (not including titles) I had 3503 typed words in my poems, omitting version 1 of poem 28, & some of the hand-written portions.
We covered seasonal, celestial, and water imagery pretty well - I mentioned Spring (8 times) Summer (1 time), Winter (1 time), Seasons (2 times), & no mention of Fall / Autumn! The sun, moon, & stars all get several mentions. Sand, tides, rivers all get mentions too.
Common alliyah tropes? No boats, no color poems, no origami poems this year unlike previous years! No mention of dark cyan. While there were 0 chickens, birds were mentioned 5 times. We did get a monthly-musing April poem though. A few home-sick & ancestry poems were written too!
Forms: We had list poems, paragraph poems, concrete poems, 1 definition poem, 1 woven poem, 1 haiku, and 2 songs.
In connection to the title of the thread "loose-ends" were mentioned 6 times and many references to tying, threads, binding, knitting etc were made throughout the month. Surprisingly no mention of any nets.
My NaPo used 125 ampersands (&)
top words: (omitting words like but, i, or etc.)
& - 125 and - 27 like - 23 know - 19 will - 19 see - 18 love -17 maybe -16 every - 15 never - 14 one - 14 want - 14 time - 11 always - 10 believe - 10 stars - 10 tide - 10 way - 10
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
Gender:
Points: 144125
Reviews: 1227