Two nights ago I woke early thinking about the poetry I’ve been writing lately. The thought that came to my mind was, “You’re trying too hard”.

It seems a bit trite to suggest that my soul was speaking to me, but I actually think it was.

Perhaps not my soul, perhaps my subconscious mind, maybe my scholar, possibly just me at a time I was not busy being Me.

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know right away this is not my typical poem. This is a poem stripped of pretense, stripped of me trying to be a Poet, stripped of lyricism and allusion.

This is a poem trying to express a simple thought, that in the process of trying to be “something we think we are supposed to be” we are forgetting that we get to be what we want to be.

A simpler poem could read:

We are not
the plant,
we are
the planter.

Except that I think there is more to this poem than this.

The turning point here is the word “pretending”. This is the word I went back and forth with, at one point using “thinking” you were a flower and . . .

Shoot! I just realized the word should be “wishing”.

I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t think of that just now when I was going through other words to put here. I just hadn’t thought about the word “wishing”.

So you’ll see what I mean, here is the poem that originally was going to be used, that I am talking about above:

pretense

you spent
all this time
pretending
you were a flower
when
you could have
planted
so many seeds

Wishing is the right word here, more so than pretending. At least for the water I want this poem to carry.

And as important as it is to me to get that word right, this poem is also part of my own personal growth. This poem is about me, about me wishing to be a poet when instead I could simply have been writing so many poems.

Two weeks ago I was at the International Future City Championships in Washington, D.C. with the middle school team that I mentor.

The competition is amazing. You can read about it here. That is a separate story.

At the end of that event the sponsors throw a party for the students, teachers and mentors. At that party they hired a caricature artist.

Arriving fairly early to the party, the teacher of the team I mentor and I sat down and got our caricatures drawn.

The process was amazing to me and though I’ve had this done at least twice before, I saw it through the lens of being a poet.

The artist took a few glances at me then started to draw with confident strokes. Not once did he pick an eraser, pausing only to change pens now and then.

Other party attendees gathered around to watch the process.

For him, though, this was a sketch. Had he taken more time, he could have crafted, I’m sure, more impressive art.

On the other hand, everyone there loved what he was doing. I will treasure the caricature.

It crossed my mind then, thinking as a poet, is this something I can do as well? Not with drawing, but with poetry.

Can I write a poem all at once that others will want to read?

The analogy isn’t perfect in my head. Part of my thought was that I could think of poems as sketches.

The other part was that I could step away from my need to be a Poet and just be a poet.

That the was start of the path that led to this poem today.

Writing a poem that is instantly meaningful to a reader, that doesn’t have layers and allusions but is still poetic, still clearly a poem, that skill isn’t really in my poet’s toolkit.

And I want it to be.

My method here was to immerse myself in the writing of other poet’s who have done this successfully. Today that poet was Rupi Kaur and her book “milk and honey”.

Rupi’s poems are powerful and carry a lot of water, to re-use a phrase from above. She speaks to her audience with clarity and insight. She speaks to them with great respect and an obvious desire to reach them.

The theme’s of her poems, as she states at the end of her book, are “love, loss, trauma, healing, femininity, migration and revolution”. Rupi is also a woman of color and speaks to that community.

I only feel qualified to write, from that list, about love, loss, trauma and healing.

I don’t feel I can write for Rupi’s community, not directly. But I am part of other communities that need poetry and I have life experiences that deserve to be shared in the hopes that others can learn and possibly heal from me speaking about them.

I had only ever glanced at Rupi Kaur’s poetry but this morning I took the time to read through the entire book, keeping a pencil at hand and taking some notes along the way.

So this poem is really about me. About me not wishing to be a Poet but to start planting the seeds that will lead me to truly become a poet, beyond the need for others to see me as a poet.

I don’t want to have only one style. This is what came to my mind so early in the morning. I always try to write a poem that is clearly a Poem.

And I’m not being critical of my poetry. I love the poems I’ve written and I’ll continue to write poetry like that.

But here, with this poem, I am starting to practice writing poetry of a different style.

I’ve also been writing two or at most three poems a week. I want to write twenty poems a week–not to post or populate this blog with more, but to learn through iteration and attempting to learn from the style of other poets.

I have written a couple of poems in the style of Emily Dickinson which stretched my skillset quite a bit. Through that process I discovered more of what I can and want to do as a poet.

This poem today is inspired by Rupi Kaur.

And here is the WordPress AI’s interpretation of this poem:

Nice.

The image that is featured here was taken during a vacation at the Outer Banks a year and a half ago. We were on the bay side of the island and I got several shots of this flower with the sun setting behind.