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Listening I hear and remember things present and past
Waves crashing, calling to me like a special friend
Wind whipping by, whistling secret tunes only I can hear, so graceful, so moving
People talking, never stopping, always talking
They never stop to listen, to listen to the beauty of the silence
My paper crackling, urging me to write, to write haunting words of sound
Whispering thoughts encasing me, embracing me, holding me safe from the noise
Growling cars, roaring by, tearing at my silent world of peace, making me lose the winds tune
Birds chirp almost encouragingly, urging us to grow wings, to fly, to soar high and low with them
But alas my dear birds I am earth bound and so I will have to stay
Although if you listen you will hear the secret tunes of the wind in the silence of peace and be able to listen and hear, remembering things present and past
A Bit of Commentary
I love this one for the art. I think the crab, at the time, was my masterpiece in this whole book (though, no spoilers, but, there might be another crab a few pages later). I also think, looking back, that this style was so fun because it was so effortless, I just let myself slip into that space between thinking and doing. That space that I've found so much harder to find in the adult world of structure and responsibility.
Reading the poem I, yet again, cringe at the way I used the words. I see my teenaged self, sometimes, as a pompous ass. I mean, who talks like this poem, I reason, except someone who is trying to prove everything and more. But, to be fair, the poem has a wistful and sad center that speaks to a lot of my feels back then, and beautifully so.
These days I feel less sad but also less able to express such things with poetry. I've taken a long hiatus from writing poetry, mainly because I felt I wasn't cut out for it, or that, as was made abundantly clear to me by society, poets/authors/or really any writer often isn't going to make big money at what they do. One of my mom's biggest concerns when I started college was that the degree I pursued would make me money and too far secondly (though possibly unintentionally so) happy.
Really, I've been seeing so many glimmers of this part of myself, the one seen in the words and art of this poem (and the whole book, really, though much less sad overall), in the recent months. I feel like I've found myself again (again). I say doubly again because I thought I'd found myself when I rediscovered my introvert sometime last year but that was only half the finding. I found the rest of me in the process of taking control of my life, making it possible for me to stop taking my birth control without fearing an extremely unwanted thing.
Who knew that manufactured hormones could be such a self-obscuring thing? The glimmers are me, fully and completely, finally coming back to myself. It makes me so happy that I can see being an improved-by-age version of the young woman who wrote this poetry book again.
I also deeply and achingly miss living in a coastal town, running on the beach and being able to just bask in the beauty of the Oregon Coast on a daily basis.
with <3
—A Recovering Design Imposter