 |
| [from my final portfolio] |
Being half way done with something is an odd state of time. The glass really isn't nearly half full or nearly half empty, but instead I've been able to taste half and drink it in. As I'm packing up my room for storage, I unfolded two pieces of poetry I had handed in my first semester. In 2011. One was written for the assignment, and the second was a poem I had written my senior year of high school. I have been reciting them out loud for the past 30 minutes, in a bit of disbelief that those are my words. I am getting reacquainted with a part of myself that I never actually fully explored. I am beyond glad that I have held onto part of my need for art, having just completed my digital photography course and ready for two more studios in the fall, but now I'm coming to realize that there are many dimensions of expression that I've very much consciously forgotten about. Thank you Mrs. Perryman and Matt. The villanelle from my senior year strikes me as a timely message to myself.
I think coming full circle from being innocent and chastising those who live in fear, to becoming someone who lived in fear, and now as someone who recognizes how immobilizing that can be is a critical step moving forward. This piece is ghostly because of that.
On layers of nostalgic ink, where
finger smudges coddle the toothy bare
face, the eternal ephemeral moment belongs to the scene
of jumbles and jambles of a second, a minute, an hour
that are the memories, which tumble and read
like fairytales, whisking away the here.
Your mind races, skips, twirls, and no longer belongs here
as innocence evades the fortress protecting your ware-
house of knowledge. You read
those books, you. And bear
the burden of the world as each hour
adds a year since your eyes were clearer before they had seen
just one ravaging lie and blundering scene.
Silly, kiddy tunes giggle with bubbles to hear
the echoes of wonder and fireflies in the hushed hour
of the night, the echoes of rolly-polly swings where
the sky was already reached by the bare
hands that play the musical reed.
I emerged from that twinkling dream to read
signs of happily ever after fading, only seen
in the tails of a shooting star, bare
of all loss. Yet here,
my beating soul and wishful hands wear
away the sadness in my bones during that final hour.
As each hour
passes, the sun morphs light to read
the tones in the glossy façade of a memory, where
the shadows of a still and frozen scene
move with the life of here
and now. Who can bear
this truth; in the dawn of our lives, we were never bare
of knowledge and grace. Our
ears could hear
and our eyes could read
the real meaning of actions in each scene.
We were not nursed by caution or rocked by fear to the brink where
here is gone after years of being wisdom-seekers, and there is
where our lives remain in
the reed frames that hold up the still scene of another’s wondrous
life.
