#apoemaday
On March 21, 2015, I changed my relationship with poetry. I started a project of trying to write a poem a day for a full year. In one sense, I failed — there were a few days that year when I didn’t write a poem. But I wrote over 330 poems, and I learned a lot about poems and the craft of poetry in that year.
Since then, I've used poetry to hold deep emotions up to the light. I process difficult situations, memorialize the passing of people I care about, and offer gentle insight to my friends when they're going through hard times. Sometimes I distill good conversations into poems. Poetry is one more catalyst that can help enrich the world, and empower people.
Above all, I believe the healing power of poems should be accessible. I aim to share at least one poem a month via social media and sometimes my newsletter, Intravenous Poems. I also have a Patreon account: with the help of some incredibly loyal friends and supporters, I published my first book of poems in 2016. singing my mother down means the world to me. It's a chronicle of my emotional journey over a few intensely challenging years, during which I lost my mother, got a divorce, and found love where I never expected to. It's one person’s narrated guide to grieving and renewal. I hope it will help others navigate grief. Writing it helped me get my head above water.
I went on to publish a second book of poems in 2019, further chronicles of living, loving, and learning that I call labyrinth.
Now, all I have to do is remember to tell people these books exist… and with your help, just maybe, I will.
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