It sounds… overwrought.
The statement, “I’ve been writing poetry for years.”
It’s true.
Though, like most things in my writing life, it’s not nearly as romantic as it sounds. No fancy feathered quills or tormented hair-wrenching in the name of creating.1 Mostly it’s just me typing out two or three lines at a time in the Notes app of my phone in the middle of the day: the drudgery of school pick-up, the hassle of the grocery store, the actual wait required for water to boil.
A product of my time
Like many people my age, I was left cold at the poetry of sophomore year. “Wandering Lonely As a Cloud?” No thanks William Wordsworth. It is the year 2000 and my friends and I are singing “Blue (Da Ba De)” in my 1991 baby blue Mitsubishi Mirage with the plastic hubcaps. We are not into wandering; we are into raving (or at least pretending to… since Top40s radio was as close to the electronic music scene as one could get in southern Arkansas.)
Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the poetry that I’ve seen scattered about on social media2. Sometimes just two or three lines. Not a lot of rhyming, no sophomoric flashbacks to couplets. Just people catching glimpses of truth and holding them in place for the rest of us to appreciate.
And now a tangent on the blooming patterns of lilies
I learned from my Nana that lilies bloom when lots of the other flowers have already withered up and quit. I don’t know the scientific reasoning for this but it sounds like the actual definition of “late bloomer”. Oh and when they do bloom they only do it once per year. Sounds like some stereotypical hyperfocus if you ask me.
It’s with that in mind that I tell you that the poem below was inspired by… well this is embarrassing… me. Me and my beautiful neurodivergent friends who manage to sparkle and shine not *despite* our incongruence with what society deems acceptable, but maybe because of that oddness.
Lilies // Audacity
The outrageous ruffles alongside her impeccable freckles
The colors mirroring the sunset of a muggy summer evening:
a giggle coupled with an invitation of things to come
The audacity to live in the heat of midsummer
Everything else frivolous and chartreuse and lovely
has had the good grace to die.
Her strength is her ignorance,
Or is it in her decision to not care?
Her “inability to read the room”
allows her to outshine the rest.
Poetry is weird
Unlike prose, poetry doesn’t have hard and fast rules. (Well… some forms do but I’ve already talked about my distaste for that.)
That, added to the familiarity of the correct structure of prose (beginning, middle, end), and grammar (subject and verb agreement with a properly built prepositional phase), and I feel like I have “checkmarks” by which I can validate the “appropriateness” of my work.
Poetry pulls that entire rug out from under my structure loving brain. It leaves me feeling bare and frazzled and unsure.
But I still kind of love it the same way it’s possible to love getting lost in a new city. The magic is in not knowing what kind of beauty you might stumble into on the next block.
What about you?
What do you use to catch the muse when she knocks on your door eight minutes into your child’s bedtime routine?
Just in case my description wasn’t clear.
No idea what I’m talking about? That’s okay!
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