I'm Writing Poetry Again

On old friends and remembering who you've always been

A completely unexpected thing happened to me a few weeks ago—I started writing poetry again.

I had flown to upstate New York to visit one of my dearest friends in the world. While we were sitting on his porch with the daffodils just barely blooming that far North, Owen asked me if I had been writing anything new recently. I told him about this Substack and the book I’ve been working on, but then he interrupted me—“no, I meant, have you written any new poems???”

Here’s the thing about friends who’ve known you for a long time. They know you in a length you sometimes can’t even perceive in your own self.

When I first met Owen, poetry was my medium. It was what I wrote. All through high school, college, and my years living in New York, that was simply what I did. I was the girl who founded the poetry club in high school. The editor of the literary magazine in college. My thesis was a year-long poetry project. In New York I’d take extra-long lunch breaks in the park to write poems in the back of my notebook, and when I first met Owen at a birthday party in Brooklyn I sent him my poems in the mail (yes, we fell in complete platonic love with one another).

“Ok hear me out,” Owen said as I pulled our shared blanket over my lap, “of all the titles you have—teacher, healer, writer, etc.— to me, you’ve always just been…a Poet.”

I think I kind of gasped when he said that, maybe not outwardly, but inwardly, like a fish that got put back into water and started breathing again.

I’ve known for years that I needed to start writing poetry once more. I did, actually, when I was pregnant. It was a lifeline during a time when I very much needed one. But there was still a part of me that resisted—resisted doing it, resisted sharing it. A part of me that was unconsciously—for reasons of protection and endurance I still don’t fully understand—resisting, and restricting, my own self.

But when Owen said this, something broke away inside of me, like the cap falling off a flower bud, and I thought…why not?

So as soon as I got home from that trip, I started writing again. It felt clunky, but also cozy. Like coming back to a firmly shut-up home after a long time abroad and realizing, with an ache, that it smells both different, and the same. And then June swooped in last week with a monthly intuitive reading all about creative liberation (which I had filmed, by the way, before this whole revelation), and suddenly my writing practice bloomed.

And when I say bloomed, I mean it’s been like the daffodils, appearing in a late North Country spring and bringing me joy—not necessarily because I plan to do anything with them, but simply because I love being among them.

I'm still curious how poetry will weave into what comes next, into all the things I've been reshaping in this season of my life. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a poem I wrote when I was eight months pregnant. I stumbled upon it when I got home and started digging into my own self again and realized it spoke so beautifully to our reading for this June—for the dawnsong of your own creative becoming.