http://ehsselfworthproject.blogspot.com/
THE WORD.
I wrote a word on my skin for all to see.
A symbol of what is.
Buried in me.
Just one word - full of meaning.
So complex, deeply feeling.
Now you know me, like never before.
I have this word and so many more.
I keep them here, so I will be safe.
These words are my enemy inside the gates.
I changed the moment I let it out.
The word is no longer what I care about.
The word won’t define me.
I’m letting it go,
Moving forward, trying to grow.
We wrote words on our skin
Now we can see.
I know you - you know me.
The words we’ve written don’t keep us apart
The words unite us, they’ve opened our hearts
A new understanding - a new respect.
There is beauty inside us, we should not neglect.
We all have something we try to hide
People will love us when we let them inside.
I wrote these comments when another blogger quoted my last line.
ReplyDeleteI am flattered that you chose to quote those lines of my poem. I didn’t like them and spent probably two or three weeks staring at them and trying to figure out a better ending. In the end I couldn’t figure out a better way to say it. One of my favorite poets is Robert Frost. Instead of using oblique language to hide meanings, he used very plain language to hide oblique meanings. I don’t find those lines very elegant or especially poetic, but it says what I wanted to say the way I wanted to say it.
I started out with……
“We all have something
That we try to hide
But people will love us
When we let them inside.”
First off I got rid of the “that.” “ That” has no place in literary writing. Then I got rid of the “but” and just turned the sentence into two distinct statements. Do you see how it completely changes the meaning? The “but” makes the love dependent on the hiding. Without “but” the love is dependent on the letting. You could break the two statements down to this;
We try to hide.
People love us when we let them.
Two distinct and independent statements. The rest of the words just flesh out the ideas of plurality and active tense that I was trying to instill in the last half of the poem when I switched from I…I…I to we…we…we. The use of the word “inside” is a reference to the enemy inside the gates mentioned earlier (a line I really like). This construct also hides the deeper meaning from the casual reader. I did the same thing earlier in the poem. Can you find it?
The real message is; don’t be afraid to let people love you. We get negative ideas about ourselves and we build castles around those ideas so people won’t see them and then we end up as prisoners trapped inside a fortress of our own making, along with the enemy. Stop caring about the negative ideas, let them go and let love in. It’s so easy….and so hard.