Skip to main content

Poem: Thoughts Revealed in Ink and Lead



How beautifully, it seems, my physical world is colliding and intertwining with my spiritual world. 

I quickly wrote down this poem about my morning's activity of transforming my ongoing journal of ten years (!?) into a bullet(ish) journal. I hope these words can encourage you to take a journey you may have been avoiding. Or acknowledge the beauty of a past you might be ashamed of. Or to maybe even just write it all down and let it be without having any judgement for it, good or bad. Because I guarantee you it will be valuable to someone some day.


Thoughts Revealed in Ink and Lead


Flipping through the past, numbering pages
Turn by turn, the pen ink changes
Then to pencil, the lead weight softens
Back to pen again, now in color

Once my thoughts were in black, bold
Then became a bit runny, muddy, black still, though
Scratched out ideas in every other line, corrections, re-directions
(Forget that. It was silly.)

Then they all turned to grey. Cloudy. Uncertain
The words were sure, naively so
(But the truth rests in the smudges of the eraser)
Still, never to be removed. Only faded with every new read.

And the last of these, the truest thing, etched quickly and plainly
Not once erased, not second guessed. 
Just written, accepted, and left to rest unread.
Sure. Of nothing. 
Fed up. And ready to let go.

And now, I am back to ink. But in blue this time.
Blue like water. Flowing.
Knowing, only, that change can, will, must come. 
Knowing, because it has come.
And it was good. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How on Earth Did I Get Here?

This photo was taken at my introduction (Gusaba & Gukwa), a traditional Rwandan ceremony that comes before a religious wedding in which the bride's dowry is settled among the two families. Afterwards she is brought out (I was escorted by my brother, bridesmaids and aunt) to greet her new family, exchange gifts, and share a meal next to her new (official) betrothed. That day, I felt like I was in a movie. In That particular moment, I was trying - and failing - to stop giggling. The second I saw my then fiance sitting in a banana-leaf chair next to a vacant one, which I would eventually occupy, atop a low, covered platform, dressed in his silky, brown traditional Rwandan garments, looking at me cooly, staff in hand, like a king, the realisation that this was actually happening to ME erupted in the form of uncontrollable laughter. No. It was not anything like the twenty-something versions of my future wedding I had conjured up during my childhood. Now it is three m...

When Being Yourself Feels Wrong

In the US, the phrase has become a cliche.  It's synonymous with "The Land of Opportunity".  It was on a poster in at least one of my teachers' classrooms every year of grade school. It's every baby-boomer parent's dream for their child. It's the millennial battlecry.  "Be Yourself"  (or "bee yourself" when the poster had an illustration of a bee on it). I grew up to this mantra playing on repeat in the back of my mind. I continually strove to live up to this no-standard standard. I never tried to be trendy, and, as a matter of fact, I tried to be as un-trendy as possible. I always spoke my mind. I never pretended to be happy if I wasn't. I admitted proudly to others that I didn't like meeting people. To clarify, I didn't just happen to be that way out of nowhere. Much of this attitude came about because I was picked on in elementary school, and I quickly realised that popular, trendy kids were not going to like me. It...