And still, I am human

Neetra C.

  • Try as I might, there really is no way to describe my artistic process. That's just the nature of my poetry. It is inconvenient, erratic, and falls onto my pages chunks at a time. It shows itself at precisely the moments I don't have a pencil, forcing me to grip it amongst other thoughts, until I can find a page to store it on. It's never there when I need it for a school assignment, or a love letter, but rears it's head when I'm sobbing, or trying to sleep at night. I've tried to keep aside notebooks specifically for my poems, to dedicate time just for poetry, but recently I've learned just to keep a notebook on me and hope for the best. These three poems, for example, are poems that were not easy to put on paper, since they all stemmed from trauma. "What I Never Told You," focuses on the guilt that can follow childhood innocence. It was such a specific feeling that the words didn't all come to me right away, and inevitably, parts of the poem ended up on gum wrappers and napkins. "Goldfish Memories," and "The Graduation Party," both about the loss of childhood innocence, were even harder to pen down, and the first draft consisted mainly of scratched out words. But despite the bumps, the sporadic ebb and flow of words in my head, I ended up with three poems I am proud of. Maybe that's just my poetry. It never comes easy.

  • Creativity is the ability to see beyond what is in front of you. Everyone can see our world, the physical going-ons of day to day life. Creative people go beyond that, and find emotion in things as unassuming as a red wheelbarrow, a nightingale, or life's other little oddities.

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Dear Nameless Politician

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Holding the Stars with Quiet Hands