Write a poem

“My first poem was to an old friend of mine, who I have known for more than eight years. She may not have known it at the time, but when we first started to get closer, she was actually helping me through a very tough time. I wanted to completely reinvent myself, or more fittingly, find myself after being surrounded by so much toxicity and pressure from the friends I had growing up. She helped me do that. So, I wrote her poem formatted like a “thank you” note where I told her everything she never knew she did for me and every way I have been better since. She doesn’t go to the same school as me anymore, so I sent it in an email (not my preferred form of communication). She called me when she read it, and she told me how much she appreciated it and me. She was happy to know the impact she made on me and told me the impact I made on her. It felt amazing, and it made her feel amazing too.”

“After the instructor introduced the agenda for the class, and she said that she would first talk about writing poems and then said we would be given 6 minutes to write a poem, I was uncertain. I don’t recall the last time I wrote a poem. It had to have been decades ago, back when I was forced to do so in school. I sure never voluntarily wrote a poem before. It just wasn’t my style. But to my surprise, the poem just flowed out of me, I guess because of what I’m processing right now in my life, last week especially, with my family’s decision that my child needs to be hospitalized for his eating disorder.”

“the waves coughed up metaphors / the rocks were bathed in cerulean sunset / the tender pages from my notebook made love with the violent salt air / my fountain pen was heavy with new emotions that came with the realization of hidden potential / my lungs choked with a passion hitherto unknown / my heart pumped solely for the words that were to stream out [...] and then I asked myself if I was here to write about the boy or the sea / my heart screamed it was always about the boy, but my eyes betrayed me as it fell in love with the sea at the very moment [...] I looked up as if the sky would bless me / and then I wrote about the sea.”