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Learning to Love Myself

  • Friday, June 29, 2018 3:23 PM
    Message # 6350535

    Attached is my first and only poem. Thank you for the prompt.

    1 file
  • Monday, July 02, 2018 11:57 AM
    Reply # 6355221 on 6350535
    Anonymous

     

    Learning to Love Myself                                                     

     

    because I was ashamed of  my immigrant parents,

        I was afraid to bring friends home

    because I shunned conflict,

         I found uncertain joy in the company of others

    because I refused to share my life story,

        they assumed I was one of them

    because I was not one of them,

        fear displaced trust

     

    because my native-born children gave me a legitimacy

       I would not claim for myself, I thought I had arrived

    because I still longed to belong

       something was missing

           until I heard someone ask  ‘what is the meaning of life?’

     

    because I searched for the answer

       as if my life depended on it

    because I had devoted the last third of my life

      to painting, writing, listening, reading,

    learning that life has meaning when beauty abounds

      even when Guernica portrays pain and injustice

     

    because openness allows love to thrive

       I must love myself first

     


  • Wednesday, July 04, 2018 5:28 PM
    Reply # 6360705 on 6350535

    Brava, Constance and Alice , for posting here!  Among the first to do so :)

    Constance, your first poem, wow!  Your use of biblical and literary allusion is so smart and effective a metaphor for leaving a relationship, and the anaphora of "because" keeps the utterances in the reader's body/feeling even as the intellect is making sense of the references. I love the phrasal symmetries, too:  "it tests, it tries, it transforms" and "both saviors and sinners." Beautiful cumulative effect down the page.

    Alice, what I notice right away is the jam-packed music of repeating sounds: the "sh" in "ashamed" and "shunned, "the "fr" in "afraid" and "friends," the "nd" in "friends" and "shunned," the "un" in "shunned" and "uncertain," the long-u in "refused" and "assumed."  And this:  "life has meaning when beauty abounds."--then closing on the repeating "v" of "love" and "thrive," the humming motor of that.

    Thank you both :)

    ~Marj




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