September Poetry Challenge
/As a new school year begins, I have set a few monthly challenges for myself. These challenges are all meant to remind me to connect with my creativity or spirituality in simple (hopefully daily) ways. For September, I am going to try my best to write an original poem every day, and to share what I’m writing. None of these poems will be brilliant. They’ll all be mostly first drafts. But the hope is that by stepping regularly into the craft of writing poetry (which was where I first really discovered my love of writing as a high school sophomore), I’ll tap into a part of myself that has been a bit dormant lately.
So, without further ado, a couple poems from the early days of September:
You Were Dead.
You died in November with the first snow.
That snow stayed until April, and you were dead
all that time.
I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s true.
You tried all the ways of coming alive again:
Changing, giving up, clinging, buying, scrolling, sharing.
Going undercover.
Nothing worked. Until
you began to notice something:
The stories that you were scared of—they brought you alive.
The habits that were the hardest to hold—the simplest, plainest choices
they returned you to your home.
You say you want to know God.
Well, here’s something to try:
Do the things that make you feel so true
so much like you
that it breaks your heart
for the beauty of it.
Isn’t that poetry?
Beauty is truth, truth,
beauty.
God finds you how he made you.
Right there, dead center.
It’s only you who believe that the path
up and out of darkness
must be winding.
September 3rd Poem
The library was closed, but the park was quiet and cool.
We rested,
and worked.
You found new shoes while the baby ran around.
I am getting used to simply following.
It is the Important Work.
Back home,
we opened a cheap bottle of wine
and sent our shared agreement to a possible future.
We wait.
I am allowing myself to swim in comfort these days.
Because it’s all unknown,
but it could all
be beautiful.
Thank you for reading.
-Beth