I know, I know, I owe you guys a post all about how amazing Advocacy Day was, and I promise I'll get there! But it is Music Monday and the last day of NaBloPoMo covering poetry, and so I want to get a post in to cover those. I heard this song yesterday on the Christian rock station, and it linked well with the last poem that I had wanted to make sure to share.
Depression
A black cloud descends,
Blue sadness and black fatigue
Swirl
As it tightens around me;
It binds my arms,
Makes me unable
To fight its chafing effects.
My life no longer belongs
To me.
Scars appear,
Tears fall,
Yells come from my throat,
But it is the cloud that does these things,
Not me.
I try to look past the cloud,
Try to remember happiness,
But my memories are blocked
By the force that governs my life;
It censors happy words,
Thoughts, pictures,
But there is one thing it cannot stop...
A high, clear note
Penetrates the darkness.
Music follows
As a flute flirts
With my cloud,
Chasing bits away
Until happiness returns.
One thing that I've noticed throughout this infertility journey has been the tendency of some people to want to brush aside the effect that infertility has on me and that pain that I feel as a result of this disease. From my perspective (which the therapist in me is obligated to point out is a limited one), it seems like the people that know about the infertility and its effect on me are divided into two camps: those who want my infertility to be out of my way and those who want my infertility to be out of their way.
That doesn't mean that the people in the second camp don't care about me. I know they do. They show it in other ways and in other areas of my life. And sometimes they try to help me deal with the infertility, too. But there's a very distinct difference in how it comes across.
The difference shows in how people talk to me and how they talk about me. It shows in how they ask me how I'm doing and how they offer advice. It shows in how they tell me about their pregnancies and how they relate to me after telling me about their pregnancies. It shows in how often they check in to see how I'm doing and in how they react if I tell them I'm having a hard time. It's the difference between whether they want to support me or whether instead they want to fix me.
I've been surprised at times by who has fallen into one camp or the other. People that I generally expect to be more of the "fix it and forget it" type have said things that have really touched me or have told me they're available any time I need or want to talk. People that have been there for me in other areas have offered platitudes or repeated the same advice without listening to what I'm really saying.
I wrote this poem last winter about how it feels when the pain is ignored:
Tear tracks stiffen and dry out,
Cracks in my armor,
Cracks in my soul
Leaving oozing open wounds.
My essence drains through
The sieve of my heart
And lies on the floor like sand
To be swept into a corner,
Forgotten.
You can't fix the pain of my infertility. No one can. But please don't ignore it, either. Please, ask me how I'm feeling. Ask me what I need. Ask how you can support me.
I am a lioness
Mistress of all I see
The grasslands of Africa are my playgrounds
The pride my playmates.
I am bonded to the earth
By the bones of my ancestors.
Were I to be removed from the savannah,
I would lose
All connection.
Just a quick post today and tomorrow since I'm going to be out of town for a conference. This poem came from the same prompt as Day 1, but two years later.
I am the Echo, the sound of what you have lost;
I am the haunting melody of the panflute,
Reminding you of what you never had.
I am the rocks at the shoreline,
Worn smooth by the tumbling waves.
The ocean is my mother, the sky my father.
I am wistfulness personified.
Today basically sucked. It was supposed to be the day of my pre-IVF evaluation, the last bloodwork and ultrasound before starting my shots. Instead, I got to see my lovely, glowing 8-months-along client. I've been dreading this appointment for a week. My one work friend hugged me and then suggested that I go make a Build-a-Bear during my lunch break to cheer up. So I did.
Enter Hope. Over a year ago, I had said that it hurt too much to have hope, and one of my friends said that she would hold my hope for me until I was ready for it. Along the same vein, when I can't have hope, now I can still have Hope.
I wanted something gender-neutral for the bear to wear, so I got an Orioles uniform. Given how bad the O's tend to be, we'll see if that turns out to be ironic.
Tan cuddly bear
Repository of hope
Helps me to hold on
My computer's not working and the camera is shutting down the Blogger app on my phone, so y'all will need to wait for a pic.
The prompt: For 3 minutes non-stop, list all the words you associate with snow (or rain or wind). Write a paragraph from the list, but do not repeat any word. You are not limited to the words on your list. Line it out as a poem.
Waking up
Snow falling
Glitter on the ground
No school
Snowmen
Forts
Fights
Sleds flying down
Big Bear Mountain
Today's poem came from the same prompt as Day 3 about sources of light.
Light from Darkness
Out of darkness
Comes pure light,
Electricity,
Bursts of brightness
Shooting across synapses,
Containing thoughts, ideas, dreams
Like bright candles
Or explosions in chemistry
With fertilizer and saltpeter,
Or August 6, 1945
Over Hiroshima,
And the enlightenment that came
And the new ideas,
Some of which will become reality.
Most will remain, however,
Simply stars in synapses.
Fall 2001 was quite an eventful semester at the University of Maryland, and not just because of 9/11. Just before Labor Day weekend, DH had to take me to the hospital (despite NOT knowing the area, so I had to navigate) from early week practices of marching band because of an asthma attack. There was a rash of robberies on campus and in town. On about September 6, a guy died on the steps of a frat house of GHB. On September 10, a guy died on the railroad tracks. Then there was the obvious, made especially frightening there both because of the high New York/New Jersey population concerned about family members and because it turned out that two of the hijackers had stayed at a nearby motel and worked out at the gym at the mall we all went to. And then, on September 24, a tornado went across the campus and killed two students.
There was definitely good that semester as well. The most important to me was that my sister Catie was born that year, on October 23. My cousin got married on September 15. DH and I were in the first months of being together, in that stage where everything feels perfect despite, in our case, living 8 hours apart. We even had random snow flurries in September! The football team was under a new coach and was ranked for the first time in a long time. But even that had a significant downside. When part of the marching band went down to an away game at Georgia Tech and won by 3 in OT, we had bottles thrown at us and were attacked by students after the game. Two years before, when we had lost by 3 in OT, there were some guys who tried to grope the flags, and one of our staff members got hit after he told the guy he couldn't cut through the band. So I had been holding my flag ready to use it on anyone who tried to grope me and trying to make sure the freshmen girls were in the middle of the formation. But we sure didn't expect what we got! I'll never forget watching a drum major and a staff member take down a guy that was running through the band throwing punches.
Since that was the semester when I was taking a poetry class (it was on the way to that class when I saw the flurries, actually!), I wrote a sestina about how crazy the semester had been. I'm pairing it with some REM here because that song really was what that semester felt like.
Fall 2001
What have we come to,
Living in College Park?
Weeks of tornadoes, robberies and death?
Going through our days in fear of what will be next?
And football made the Top 25 polls--
Hell really has frozen over!
At least we're not in Central Park,
In the city of collapsed buildings and death,
Wondering who will get anthrax next.
Bush's approval is rising in the polls,
But where will he be when this is all over?
What will his presidency reduce to?
And now the Afghans are the ones to taste death,
But which military unit will they send next?
Many support a draft, so they say in the polls,
But how will they feel when their sons go over?
How long will this go on? Will it come down to
The little kids that now play in a park?
Will the band get attacked when next
We go help our team rise in the polls?
Or does the Georgia Tech brawl mean that our trips are over?
The worst that we thought would happen to
Is is that we would get grabbed, then come back to our Park.
At least this incident didn't end in death.
In years, our kids will come back and take polls
Of who knew and who died and who thought it was over
The day our security shattered into
A million ashes spread out on Central Park--
The ashes of buildings and fires and death.
Who knew on that day so much more would come next?
The frightening thing is, it will never be over.
There will always be people who want to
Impose their views onto others, down to where to park,
And don't care if the price is their own children's death.
The only unknown is where will be next,
What country has topped the terrorists' polls.
Whew. That's the first and only time I've done a full six-stanza sestina. There was a contest going on BlogHer for writing sestinas. Actually, it's for a different fixed-form poem every week; this week is a villanelle. But that is more work and time than I have to devote to poetry right now. Maybe later in the month, but I doubt it.
This one I wrote during a poetry class I took my senior year of college. The prompt was a somewhat complicated one in five pieces:
1. Describe the person's hands
2. Describe something he/she is doing with the hands
3. Use a metaphor to say something about some exotic place
4. Mention what you would want to ask this person in the context of 2 and 3 above
5. The person looks up, notices you there, and gives and answer that suggests that he/she only gets part of what you asked
Creation
Hands
With terra cotta dried in cracks
And under the nails.
Molding,
Melding,
Shaping the clay
Into art
And usefulness,
Or maybe shaping lives,
People long ago,
Taking dust and shaping a man,
Making a companion called woman.
So what wonders are you creating there?
"This? It's just a pot."
I knew I was going to end up posting this one at some point, and it jumped out at me again today. The prompt was a meditation on a natural object.
The chestnut burr
Holds its spikes close
Like a shield
Designed to protect
The delicate nut inside
Just as I
Joke around
So no one can see
How vulnerable I am
Inside.
This format is called a two-voice poem, "a poem meant to be read aloud by two people. One person reads the left hand column, and the other reads the right. When words appear on the same line, they are read simultaneously." The prompt also notes that some have written effective poems for three voices. Maybe I'll try that at some point. (Edit: the font size is weird, so the formatting doesn't work quite right, but hopefully you get the gist. The right column is supposed to be straight!)
What What
Are you saying?
Do you mean?
I need I need
To see Some room
You more. To breathe.
You're always out
With your buddies You need me
24/7. 24/7.
I can't
Take it
Any more. Any more.
You don't understand You don't understand
That I have
Problems
That I have
A life
Besides you.
I think I think
We need more time We need some time
Together. Apart.
My mom was saying at the beginning of the week, that she's really not a fan of poetry, especially poetry that rhymes. Well, we'll see what she thinks of this one. The form is called "internal rhyme"...basically, the word at the end of each line has a word in the next line rhyme with it, but that word isn't supposed to be the last word of that next line, it's supposed to be somewhere in the middle.
Love
It begins
With spins and whirls and twirls
And curls in someone's hair.
There. Do you see the spark
In the dark, when flint and steel collide,
Slide, and become something new?
Me and you become US
As the lust crashes
Like a wave and smashes reservations.
Nations could fall,
But all I'd care about is the crash of cymbals
When we kiss, symbols of
Our love.
NaBloPoMo has a prompt every weekday to help with coming up with new poems to write about. Today's is, "What is the best poem to read when you're feeling sad?" There are a lot of poems that I've written when I was sad, since my strongest emotions are what trigger much of my writing, but those really aren't the best poems to read when I'm sad, because plenty of them would just make me more sad. This one I like for this purpose, though, since it goes to that sad place but ends on a more positive note. More from the poet-in-residence program, this one came from a prompt about sources of light.
Looking for Light
Hitting stones,
Rubbing sticks,
Playing with matches,
Searching for something to fill my life,
Something to end the abysmal darkness
In my soul.
I see candles
From church windows,
Light!
I go in,
Wondering how they got light
Into words of night,
And I see the truth.
The light is in me
If I only let it shine
And let eternal day
Into eternal night.
This Jimmy Buffett song had struck me a couple of weeks ago with its description of walls: "And the walls that won't come down/We can decorate or climb." I think, I hope that's what I'm doing with the IVF. I can't change the wall that is me and DH both being carriers for spinal muscular atrophy. But I can decorate it through infertility advocacy, and I can try to climb it with the IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
The poem is another one I wrote from the poet-in-residence program in high school. The prompt was to write about dreams and walls, as Langston Hughes did in "As I Grew Older". I am leaving off the last line because it's clearly about someone else and because it'd not crucial to the poem.
Dreaming of Joy
I dream
Of happiness.
I reach out
Into blackness,
Endlessly searching
For what may never be mine.
In the darkness,
My hands find a wall.
I look for a way around--
There is none.
I punch at the wall,
Trying to break through,
Trying to get out of the eternal night.
It takes years of endless work,
But I finally make it through
And step into sunlight.
I hope that I am able to climb the wall that I've decorated and make it through into sunlight.
Or maybe you did, especially if you knew me in high school or read this post from last February. Well, either way, you're about to see a lot more from me. Despite me not being able to keep up with the March Photo Challenge, I decided to do NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, for April because of the theme being Poetry. It doesn't just cover writing and sharing your own poems, it's also sharing other poems that have touched you, but I'm going to at least start out with my own work. I may write some new ones, or I may just post older ones. We'll just have to see where the month takes us!
When I was in high school, we had a poet-in-residence come for several weeks each year to do a weekly poetry workshop. She would give us prompts to work from, and each week after the first would start with reading the poems that had been written the previous week (she would collect them at the end to type up and share). This first poem I wrote my sophomore year, in response to a prompt of different ways to describe yourself, including as an animal, a color, a force of nature, an emotion, a sound, etc.
Portrait
I am blue, calm and peaceful,
yet also red, fiery and hot.
I am sweet when you have me,
but bitter when you lose me.
I am the sounds of birds, singing in the trees--
the sweet song of the robin,
the harsh caw of the raven.
I am the doe, running wild though others seek me.
I am the rain, saving some, killing others.
I am the daughter of the ocean--
beautiful on the surface,
turbulent beneath.
I am the dream of love.
