#apoemaday

I've been writing poems since I was very young. 

On March 21, 2015, I changed my relationship with poems. I started a project of trying to write a poem a day for the next year. There have been days when I haven't written poems. But I've learned a lot about poems and the craft of poetry this year.

These days, I use poetry to hold deep emotions up to the light. I use it to process difficult situations, to memorialize the passing of people I care about, and to offer gentle insight to my friends when they're going through hard times. Poetry is one more catalyst that can help enrich the world, and empower people. 

Above all, I believe the healing beauty of poems should be accessible. I share at least one poem a month with everyone on my newsletter, Intravenous Poems. I also have a Patreon page: I want to publish my first book of poems by the end of 2016. This book means the world to me. It's a sort of chronicle of my journey over the last few years, when I lost my mother, got a divorce, and found love where I never expected to. It's a guide to grieving and renewal in the form of poems. I think it will help a lot of people navigate grief. Writing it helped me get my head above water.

Now, all I have to do is make sure people know about it -- and with your support, I can. So head over to Patreon. Check out the rewards! You can get some nifty things there, like a wearable poem, a frameable poem, and a poem on a topic of your choosing. 

Speaking of poems! Here's another one I'd like to share. 

 

woman of red clay

 

I worked in my garden today.

Shoveled grasses, pulled up weeds,

dug the sinuous line of the channel a few feet

farther. Filled it with pebbles

against the certainty of rain.

 

I have sprinkled the garden with

your treasures, you know. Outside, they seem

more alive than they did

when you lived, when

you trapped them in bowls and boxes.

 

One of them caught my eye, a figure

who reminds me still of you. Tiny, clay,

red, kneeling

in prayer among the stones,

she sat on a windowsill for years

above a different garden. Today

I saw that she had changed.

 

She lies now on her side,

gone fetal, praying still. Time and the rain

had spared her aching knees,

and she is melting back to clay,

becoming someone new.

 

Copyright Elyria Little 2015