Poems Marinating for 15 Years

I've finally released my first collection of poems, and it's been a long time coming :)

I’ve been a poet at heart ever since I took a contemporary poetry course as an undergraduate. Poetry gave me the expressive freedom to channel deep emotion and curiosity into words. But a good poem, I learned, can take a long time to write, sometimes years or even decades. So I wrote. And rewrote. And set aside. And repeated. And did that all over again for years. Then I put all the poems away for a while. Recently, I got them back out to work on them again, and, to my surprise, found that they were nearly ready. So I’ve worked on finalizing all of them, and now the first collection is out!

The poems are grouped into types of “images.” There’s a section on grief, one on the ordinary things in the wild world, and the last on faith. I’ll be sharing some of them in the weeks ahead. Here’s the first one, to give you a taste of what these “prose poems” are like. Note that some of my more recent poems have been more formal in terms of rhyme scheme. Prose poems, in contrast, are free verse and sort of like little vignettes of thought, pointing readers at something.

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Hawk

A redtail caught in an updraft

writes out his circles for me,

steady and slow.

He’s opened himself up,

hollow bones floating

in the hollows of the sky.

Only blue is at his back.

He has everything

because he has nothing.

I want his kingly poverty,

and I beg

in the deafening wind.

I would give my money,

my home,

my clothes,

to be that poor and free.