Poetry as an emotional scrapbook ft. me
#05 - When old poems find you
Hi all,
This edition of The Fern is a week late, I hope you’ll forgive me! This past month has been full of half marathons, cross-country travels, new family members, birthday celebrations, and a persistent seasonal cold.
But I’m back! And this week, we’re talking about old poems. The kinds that haunt dusty notebooks at the bottom of desk drawers and closet floors. I wish I could say I’m the type of writer who keeps an orderly record of old journals, arranged chronologically on a bookshelf. But alas, I’m not.
I’m the kind who writes in out-of-order pages; who buys notebooks for poetry and promptly fills them with grocery lists; and whose work, ultimately, winds up strewn about the dusty floor of my closet.
Anyway, such is the truth of my creative life. But hey, it keeps things interesting! It means sometimes when I'm digging around my closet looking for a camera charger I find a poem instead. By which I mean, I rediscover an old version of myself. It's what's so special about writing, and poetry in particular. It acts like an emotional scrapbook.
I always intended to use The Fern to occasionally share my own poetry and writing – though I'm not sure I ever thought I’d share an old poem here. But here I go, doing just that, because an old poem I found recently really took me by surprise.
It's called "double rainbow" and the structure of the poem itself mimics a rainbow –each stanza mentions a color in the order of the rainbow, with the right side reflecting that structure in the opposite order. I impressed myself with this fancy technique.
There's some family lore behind this one, too: my great-grandmother always says she saw a double rainbow in the sky the day I was born. I seemed to have been reflecting on this about 2 years ago when I wrote this poem.
The emotion I was feeling at the moment was, if I remember correctly, a deep heaviness in the present paired with immense hope for my future. I think that comes through in its words.
I also wonder how I might write a poem about a double rainbow today. How different it might feel – or how similar. I might just take up that task and report back.
This week I have a prompt for you: go back into your phone notes app or a dusty old journal. Is there a forgotten, draft of a poem lurking there? If so, please feel free to share it in the comments or share what came up for you while reading it <3
That's it this week, thank you as always for reading my words. It continues to mean the world to me!
Take care of yourself and those around you,
Allison