writing poetry, exploring creativity & letting loose, pt ii
I've previously talked about joining a poetry circle as a non-poet, and I learned that, sometimes, a metaphor discloses more of a person than their name ever could. I've met people whose names dissolved from memory, but whose barest vulnerabilities clung to me long after they left.
Today's prompt was On Spring's End (prompt: how did spring end for you?) and I thought of the way a season loosens its grip and shifts itself into the next, without eulogizing what it once was. The last blossom doesn't flee the inpouring heat; it only reaches inevitably to what it can become. I wrote those two pages on a whim, and I liked how I used morphing and mourning in the left page's text:
Since the best poetry circles run on productive digression, we drifted to unexpected tangents places, and languages, and belonging (prompt: describe language of a place). Phrases surfaced from my periphery: family gatherings, tea, and food from war-torn countries. Love language. Imaginary places dreamed into existence. Places that subsist only in the architecture of someone's head. Returning to a place that never changed, even if you had. I thought of this a lot: what is the place I want to go back to?
I come from a war-torn country, and I've spent most of my life an immigrant between places. When I do visit my country, people sense I was not raised there (Doesn't my awkward dialect give it away?) I long perceived myself as someone suspended between worlds: present everywhere, rooted nowhere — we called it the in-between. But why did I ever perceived it as a problem and not a place to inhabit? I can inhabit this threshold, and often I've met the most remarkable people who also knew what it felt to exist slightly out of frame.
These days, I like to think I've become a mosaic of every place I've passed through and every person who left something of themselves in me.