5 Poems to get us through Beginnings!
What you missed if you aren't subscribed to my newsletter back in January!
Note: This post has been sitting in my drafts all year 😅 I never got around to finishing it. If I had, I feel like I would’ve written some really poetic thoughts on beginnings, maybe with a hopeful tone. There’s a lot of what-ifs. But what I know is that the person I was at the start of this year both is and isn’t the same as the person writing this now. Maybe that, in itself, is a beginning—a new version of me, shaped by small shifts along the way, leading me here to post this anyway, unfinished as it is. I’m not sure it makes much sense outside my head, but here we are. Enjoy!
Last year, I read over 700 poems, which seems wild to me! I used to love writing poetry but hated reading it, as I discussed in this Blog Post a while ago. However, these days, I really enjoy reading poems and finding inspiration for my own writing. But enough about me, here are a few poems about beginnings that I've read recently and want to share with you!
While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me
By: Charif Shanahan
“How do you know what you want If you don’t tell you?”
By: KB Brookins
“saying Because
they’re not good people when asked why I don’t attend
family functions / spreading the good word
of moving out
of a town you could never call home”
Cento Between the Ending and the End
By: Cameron Awkward-Rich
“& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body”
By: Major Jackson
“Let me begin again as a quiet thought
in the shape of a shell slowly examined
by a brown child on a beach at dawn”
Self-Portrait as Magical Girl in Translation
By: torrin a. greathouse
“& we both begin / boy sitting awkward on another’s
tongue // become girl with blurry edges”
And that was the end of the beginnings, this was as far as my post went. I hope you connected to a poem or a line in one of them at least, if so, let me know in the comments! Thanks for reading, friends 💜