After a week of dealing with a myriad of emotions, the universe has decided to send me a more positive note to break the silence here. In the last seven days, I have turned 39 and met a light I intend to keep, I have lost my earphones, some hive and my fridge compressor and I have also readied a patch I intend to plant some maize and beans.
Though I am worried about the 150 dollars needed to fix my fridge more than how much I miss my music on the go, I am grateful for the few things that are exuding light. The thirty-nine trips around the sun. The divine connection. The farm. And good friends like @trucklife-family who find positive ways to trigger the flow of my words :)
I remember the first time I figured I could spill my thoughts on a paper like yesterday. The field, I was sharing the grief of watching my favourite girl pass on might be long gone but I am sure mother earth remembers welcoming my tears home.
Growing up in a strict household meant my throat has mastered the art of reading the room and putting my curiosity on a scale. I crafted my masks for every time we needed to move back to my grandmother's house because of the challenges single motherhood came with for my late mum.
Aside from the inability to find environment-friendly due to the constant domestic violence that sprung from nowhere, I had to suppress everything that screamed different in any way. This meant burning or hiding some of my clothes as they didn't appease the Pentecostal beliefs and shelf my questions of the season.
Poetry found me blending with my teenage rage and my mother's death aftermath. My face was dry but my overthinking mind was bleeding into an empathic heart as my lungs suffocated from the cruelty of the people around me at that time.
It found me at the top of her unmarked grave crying over her stolen cross just days after we had buried her cursing fate for making her final resting place. It found me homeless soon after sleeping in trenches.
Initially, I couldn't understand why I craved to put my thoughts on a paper and reread them to myself but it is how it started. And so from an afternoon rearing my grandparent's lambs and goats, I scribbled on the back of a green piece of paper with a pencil I had found a few metres from where I was lying.
If only I could turn back and stay with you
If only I could know that you are watching
It's been days but I know that the future has changed
And that without you, I'll forever be lonely.
As I grew up, poetry became my way of life. It kept me alive when I was enduring domestic abuse and imprisonment. It breathes life into my mortal shell when life drains the fuel to keep up with an ailing world.
I was born with nothing
Other than these divine phrases
Clinging onto my soul
Waiting in the dark
To invite back the light
As my bones grew and ingested pain.
Poetry then became a lifeline that has always dragged me back to the shore every time life has tried to drown me. It is the channel best suited to convey my truth and all its rawness. It's in these words that the salvation of my soul dwells...
Here I feel safe fusing my frustrations of life with streams of gratitude that remain bound to my ageing self. I can make love to my pain but above all, dissolve it in the most healthy and conducive way for my healing artistic spirit.
...digital art made on thegallery :)
wambuku w.
I am so happy you answered this, your writing is as beautiful as ever and really resonates with me. It's such a gift. Thank you my beautiful friend, sending you lots of love xxxxxx
I'm not a poet, but I think poetry is ideal for letting out emotions (or even facing emotions or things that we would otherwise ignore in our sub conscious) that are sometimes too painful to communicate with someone.
I am happy you discovered it 🤗
I think we all are to some degree or else the saying love or pain turns us all into a poet or something close... And yes, it is a redeeming way to find healing through.
Thank you for always bringing love here 🙂
You said that so well.
You're very welcome:)
Even your post reads like poetry. Sharing these intimate feelings and thoughts with us itself becomes art. That ending: making love with pain. Is not all art and poetry children of pain?
I remember my own poetry journey, now that you asked it in your title. My words were born from frustration and inner plight and struggles. Poetry became the tamed version of the violent struggles but it became itself violent words.
I think a lot of people struggle with themselves and poetry becomes the only vehicle to get your message across.
Thanks again for sharing your intimate words.
I have the beauty of letting my soul sinh however it deems fit... I may have wanted to rid my emotions from my writing but then again that makes it incapable of doing what it does which is heal my inner child.
I would love to hear that whole story some day even if it's not today and how the journey has been this far.
Oh how I wish we could all wield writing like most healers but I get the complexities of staring at yourself on a screen or a paper full of words describing the what lies beyond the fixed smile.
I am glad you find them interesting enough :)
Maybe one day I will get to reminisce in an autobiographical sense. My mind is slowly forgetting my past so I need to write it down.
Maybe in writing the past we might heal our future? Do you think that works to heal?