This evening my mom sent me a picture.  It was a photograph of a poem I’d written back in 2001 for my creative writing class, when I was sixteen.  It was called “The Promise.”  I’d written it from the perspective of a high school senior, telling my mother that I had promised her I would never grow up but hadn’t kept my promise.  It was based off of something my own mother had always told me growing up.  “Promise me you won’t ever grow up,” she would say, and I promised her I wouldn’t.

I had forgotten about the poem when she sent it to me.  I’m harsh about my own work and viewed it as cloying or sentimental.  I was surprised that she was sending it to me, since I’d thought that I had the only copy of the poem in my own files.  But I figured she must have found a copy in her files and was feeling sentimental.

Then Mom called me, and I found out the real reason why she’d sent me a picture of the poem.  My dad happens to work at the same high school I graduated from, and my creative writing teacher stopped by my dad’s office today with the poem.  Apparently he uses it every year with his own classes to teach them how to write poems.

What? What? What?

My mom said the poem made her tear up when reading it because here I am, all certifiably grown-up now.  I teared up for a different reason – I can’t believe my creative writing teacher thought my poem was good enough to use for his classes every year.

I’m flattered and very speechless at the moment.

I stumbled across this poem recently (on Facebook, of all places) and was awed. I don’t know how I couldn’t have seen it before.  It’s so beautiful.

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz 
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: 
I love you as certain dark things are loved, 
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries 
hidden within itself the light of those flowers, 
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body 
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 
I love you simply, without problems or pride: 
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you, 
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, 
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

-Pablo Neruda

Last week, I bought this book:

Poetry is a medium that I really enjoy writing (even if I am terrible at it), and recently I’ve had the epiphany that maybe the reason why my writing ventures always failed is that my goals are too lofty for a beginner. I always thought I would write a novel or even short stories, and yet it’s poetry that I find myself writing in my sketches notebook. So I’ve decided to hone my interest in that for the time being until I get inspired to write something longer again. Anyway, I’m woefully ignorant on poetry and decided that I will never improve my form and experimentation with words if I don’t immerse myself in it more.

I am enjoying this collection very much – it mixes poetry from both classic and modern poets, and separates the poems into themes such as “Lovers,” “Music,” “Scenes,” etc.  Here is a poem that I really enjoyed and want to share with you.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.