Category: Free Verse

living in the shadows

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

I have been gone for a while
living in the shadows, the darkness,
and finding comfort there,
familiarity,
safety.

I can see the light
but it scares me.
The shadows are quiet,
impose no pressure to speak or do,
their cold embrace enveloping me
until we warm.

I’m liking it here, in the dark.
It feels familiar
for I am often here
though not for long periods of time.
There are bursts of sunlight
that beam through the clouds
interrupting my accumulation of days.
The sun tries to tell me
that really, I’m OK
because I can see the sun
and be happy for a while;
I don’t qualify for a new label.
So when the clouds roll over again
I start back at day one.

And I ask myself the age-old question:
on some level, have I always been this way?

And then I ask the question:
am I trying to make something out of nothing,
this earnesty to classify
and put myself in a box per criteria,
or is this just a simple part
of the human experience?

This time,
I am staying in the darkness for a long time.
Longer than any time before.

I feel scared of everything
all at the same time,
all the time.
Paralyzed.

I have either lost myself
or changed –
I know not which it is.

And I don’t have the energy
to do
what they tell me I should do.
I don’t want to deny the darkness
in an attempt to feel better;
I want to stay here.

Eventually I will let someone down
and I can only blame the darkness
for so many things
because after all,
shouldn’t I be strong enough to fight it off?

But then
someone on the outside
saw me, and saw the shadows.
She acknowledged,
she validated,
and she nudged me towards a new source of light.

I have been gone for a while
and I’m not back yet
but maybe,
someday,
eventually.

the unique becomes the universal

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Trees, forests, water
and time away from home
pulled my heart to the north,
to Waskesiu.

For years
I have heard, from people countless,
of Waskesiu being included in their summer plans
and each spoke of the place
with such fondness
that it made me want to stay away.
I did not want to find joy
in the same place as so many others
for fear that doing so
would render me ‘common’, ‘basic’,
or ‘just the same as everyone else’.
I fiercely believed
I needed to be different;
I needed to find a different place
to nourish myself
so I could stand apart from the crowd.
My mind told my heart
I was not allowed to go there;
I would not be happy in being the same.

With shifting priorities and family structures
this year, Waskesiu made sense
and yet,
I remained determined to spend the time
in a way that afterwards
when I shared my story
it would land outside what I assumed to be
the ‘typical’ experience.

We rented a cabin,
we brought our five-and-a-half month-old puppy,
we cooked our own food,
we hiked kilometers of trails.

We encountered hundreds of people
and dozens of dogs
and as I observed my surroundings
I saw people
laughing and talking and playing together,
running, reading, chasing after each other,
enjoying time alone,
in family gatherings spanning generations.

My eyes scanned the beaches
painted with rainbows of towels, umbrellas and bathing suits,
picnic tables holding families and food,
and hiking trails leading the way
deep into the forests
otherwise unseen from the main roads.

As I watched these hundreds of people
each in their own way
connecting with nature,
I felt my need for competition,
my need to be different,
my fear of fitting in,
fade away.
Instead, I began to think about
how many people
every summer
come to places like this
to be amongst the trees, on the sand, in the water,
away from home –
somehow
hundreds, if not thousands,
of people find some degree of reprieve and restoration
in coming here.

The unique becomes the universal.

I began to understand
the scenes before my eyes
illustrated a commonality
connecting us to our humanity –
that being in nature,
feeling the sun on our skin,
squeezing sand between our toes,
breathing in the pine of the forest
and living amongst the wilderness
are perhaps inherent needs
to us as human beings.

Perhaps it’s a need for me to wholly embrace,
rather than hold at an arm’s distance
in fear of this collective commonality,
what I need to nourish my soul.

Sameness is not always the enemy.

even in the briefest of moments

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

As I age
I have come to know grief
between each of the five letters
and beyond the formality of a definition.

I assume we all do.

Grief has its own personality,
an ability to consume your chest,
your muscles, your bones,
embodying the deepest of pains
as you sit submerged
below the water’s surface.

Grief has its own agenda,
prioritizing its need for attention
above your own,
announcing itself loudly
interrupting anything and everything else,
bringing your world to a stop.

Grief ebbs and flows
but never really leaves us
instead
it changes alongside and within us
forcibly holding our hands,
refusing to let go.

Grief has become a familiar sensation
in my body;
I hardly know how to live without it
and, call it irony,
grieve for the past where we had only
met briefly, in passing,
gifting me time to live in naivety.

In my head
I know I am strong
and I can endure,
but in my heart
sometimes
it hurts
beyond what seems to be my capacity.
I know, now,
it’s in those moments
I need to love myself more
than I instinctively consider necessary.

As I walk hand-in-hand with grief
I’m coming to understand
grief encourages recognition
of what we hold the most dear
and in a way,
even in the briefest of moments,
grief can be beautiful.

Even in the briefest of moments.

feelings, memories, metaphors and people

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

I opened an old notebook
at random
from the stack beside my bed
on the bookshelf.

A notebook of poetry
from three years ago.

The page I turned to
contained words of
feelings
memories
metaphors
and people.

I offered to the page
a wistful smile
for just yesterday
I wrote about the same
feelings
memories
metaphors
and people.

And I thought to myself:
I need to let them go.

Acknowledgement is the first step

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

My mind feels full.

Full of characters:
their personalities,
their thoughts,
and dialogue exchanged with others.

Full of phrases
simple and complex
to live in stories
or essays
or poems.

Full of scenes
replaying in memoried fragments
requesting reimagination
and depersonalization.

To empty my mind
on to the page
requires a vulnerability
that, right now,
feels insurmountable.
Fear of pain, of exposure,
of inadequately capturing
my imagination
with words.

Acknowledgement is the first step.

you thought you had more time

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

You see the first sign of a problem
emerge,
a blemish on a previously spot-free
canvas.

You tell yourself
that you should have it fixed,
addressed,
while it’s still small
before it becomes something bigger.

Time goes by
the blemish is still there
but unchanged.
You remind yourself
of the need to have it fixed.

Then
without warning
it’s no longer a blemish.

Despite your intentions
it has grown into the bigger problem
you imagined happening
but naively assumed
you had more time
because things had stayed the same for this long already.

Now, it’s undeniable,
the problem demanding your attention
engulfing the canvas.

All because
you thought you had more time
and you believed things would stay the same.

re-acquaint the pen with my hand

~ jennadawn ~ 1 Comment

I have forgotten how to hold my pen –
index, middle and thumb?
index and thumb?
concave or convex?
thumb tucked in or overlapped?

I write a line, or a word,
then my fingers fumble and fidget,
switch to a different position
then switch again a few words later.

What was once a natural extension of my hand
now lives in the unfamiliar.
Half the process now, requires learning
how to enable the pen to rest
within my fingers and thumb
to scratch legible letters,
never mind focusing my mind enough
to connect thoughts into coherency
to write at all.

I have been away from the page
for so long
the practice, the rituals I once knew
and depended on,
are foreign.

Long ago
(or what seems like long ago)
I began this practice
fumbling and learning and
constantly switching my fingers around the pen
just like I am now.

This is a chance to begin again
to re-acquaint the pen with my hand
and begin walking along a new trail
of the forest.

virtual retreat

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

The past four days
have been a gift.
Coming here,
to the office desk space
beneath the east-facing window
in the back bedroom of the house.
Here,
in a space both virtual and physical
I have reunited with her,
my creativity,
the part of me prone to playing
hide and seek
for now, has settled with me.
Notebook pages
have been filled with ink,
Word documents
have word counts spanning thousands
and all due
to my first-ever writing retreat.
Virtual connection
with writers ranging ages,
provinces and experience,
helped me feel safe
to feel, to release,
and to create,
with much more yet to come.

Deep and heartfelt appreciation to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild for creating this opportunity.