Dusty Poems 19
Dusty Poems is a poetry series where I share poems that I wrote in college, many years before poetry entered my life like a storm and took over. I started this website about four years ago, and my second post was a poem, the same poem I’m sharing today. It seemed like the scariest thing I could do. At the time, I wasn’t yet writing poetry but I usually approach anything related to writing by doing what feels the scariest and most vulnerable thing I can imagine, that way when I survive it, I know I can handle almost anything. The oddest thing, which I didn’t realize until now, looking back at the dates, less than a month after I posted this poem, I wrote my first poem in this new period that I’ve always considered the first time poetry entered in my life. That is until I came across the journal that holds the poems I’ve been posting in this Dusty Poems collection. There are many important things that have entered my life that later, upon reflection, I realized had surfaced once before, many years before it came back and made an impact. The fact that poetry is one of those things is comforting in some way. A reassurance that it was always meant to be part of my life.
Voices of the past echo through the room.
Silence runs dry.
My heart’s been struck by the moon.
Stars come tumbling down.
The forest shadows the sound.
If happiness lies behind me, what lies before me.
The rain falls toward the sky.
I stare from the ledge and see my life.
I turn away and cover my eyes.
I shouldn’t be alone but somehow I’ve made it my home.
I step back and fall.
Scream softly as you can.
My last resolution has been spent on somebody else.
I awake to see nothing and sleep to find hope.
At depth I am shallow for caring too much.
Within I am empty filled with unrealized dreams.
At length I have already failed myself.
In short I have not lived.
I close my eyes and pray.
The angels turn to dust and sparkle over the sea.
My mind fades to some distant memory.
The sun begins to rise and pour over my soul.
I am not who I think I am, and I am not who you see.
I just wish for once I could see where I was going.
All I ever wanted was to see where I was falling.
And bottled up inside of me…
Is me.
I love these lines right here:
“Stars come tumbling down.
The forest shadows the sound.”
I love the use of ‘shadows’ instead of the expected ‘softens’ or ‘hides’. It’s an unexpected choice and just lovely. For me, it conjures up the images of tall pine trees with their shadows stretching out far behind them.
Aww, thank you. I’ve always really liked those lines as well. I like the cadence of them. I like to hear that it created an image for you as well. Imagery is very important to my poetry now, so it’s neat to hear that there was some of that in my old poems as well.
You’re very welcome!