The Poem(s) I'm A Little Bit Proud Of . . .

early poems that kept my belief in me and my writing going. Also Wednesday poetry/prose day

Hello friends,

Recently

Maya C. Popa

asked for poets to share a poem they are proudest of writing, I don’t have a paid subscription (I’d be SO skint if I subscribed paid to everything I want to, but I don’t mind) so I can’t post on the original post, hence I’m sharing here. It took me quite a long time this week to even come to terms with the idea of being proud of my poetry, and to have one or two in particular I was most proud of. It felt awkward, almost wrong. Should I be proud? And Ive walked around with that in my head for a few days, and YES, yes, I should be proud. Poetry is worth something. I don’t need to be wary or shy of it, I don’t need to apologise that it isn’t prose, that I haven’t written a best selling book, that I gave up for a while. I LOVE writing poetry, I LOVE writing, and that’s okay.

Image by zaozaa09 on Freepik

Once I’d given myself permission to give worth to my writing, I looked through my work and I settled on more of my earlier pieces.

This first one I wrote in my head whilst walking up Steep Hill in Lincoln one morning on my way to uni. I managed to remember all of it, revisions included, once I got to college and could write it down. I had my ‘Writing, Stories and Myths’ coursework to hand in that morning and I replaced another poem with this. I am proud that I wrote it, remembered it, revised it in my head, and all whilst walking up a very steep hill from the bottom of Lincoln to the top. I seem to remember I got an A for it, I tended to be the only one who liked poetry and my tutors were maybe more kind because of that. Amusingly, I used to give my rejects to friends that struggled to write, they tended to get Cs. It is certainly not my best work, but it is work I am proud of.

An Evening in the Park

He lay,
Stiff and cold,
The hard slats rigid and oppressive
Beneath him.
The old seat embraced him
His only comfort in the chilling night.
All the while his
Breath

Rasped
Into the deathly silence
And the bitter wind
Twisted 
To Kiss his 
Wrinkled, trembling face,
Softly, as the first flakes fell,
The last solitary
Glimmer of his wasted life
Ebbed away.	

The next two are short and slightly playful. I wrote them when experimenting with form along with one that included mathematical equations and another that included pictures. I’m proud of myself for trying something new, even if I reinvented the wheel that others had done before. And I think they work. I remember them even now. There are some poems that I rediscover only when rereading my ‘back catalogue’. Some I like and some I don’t.

Today

Today, I write with a silver pen
(With limited ink)
Hoping for some metallic inspiration
To flow fluently onto the waiting page.
But the pen is old
And the ideas worn.
That’ll teach me to rely on an 
Old metallic, silver depositing nib!

                           **********************************************

The day I met God

Breezed in through the skylight,
Escaped by the back door,
Raised many questions
But left no answers.

The first one was an ‘in the moment’ noticing. It really happened and then I wrote a poem about it. The second was when I was lying in my bedroom, which at the time was a disused annex at the back of the garage, not really made for human habitation but I had made it my space, preferable to sharing a rather small room with my sister. I didn’t have a skylight, and I’m not religious, but the poem sprang from me. An I even say it in my mind now decides later.

So the poems I’m most proud of at the moment are the ones that were early in my journey, that made me feel I was a decent writer and that I could go on and do this more. When the words worked well.

I’m also going to try write 100 poems this year, taking inspiration from

Nelly Bryce

. So far I’ve written 3, only 97 to go!

Till my next ramble

If you’d like to follow and be notified when I next post press the button below

I’d love to hear what you think