So I'm sure some of you are like, "she said she was a poet....well where the heck is the poetry?!" Good question. A lot of it is stuck in my head waiting for the right time to pour out. Something I'm sure many of you do not know is that I haven't really written anything in a while. Let me give you a little history about "Rain the Poet". I started writing poetry when I was in like 3rd grade. I even got published in the school news letter a few times. I fell in love with the Harlem renaissance and the poets of that time. I memorized poetry and would recite it during assemblies. I even translated Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Women into French and recited it at The Alliance Francais meeting. I am passionate about words written with so much meaning they literally dance off the page. In college I started writing longer poems which were considered spoken word. I didn't even realize what I was doing until I read it and people loved it. I started writing more and more. I was able to take an ugly situation and make it cry beautiful tears on a page. Then one day it stopped. My Aunt died, a horrible ugly death. I remember being in church writing ferociously a poem to honor her life. She never heard my poetry. I never had the chance to share it with her. But I was able to write this beautiful poem that was dedicated to her life. I took her passing very VERY hard. I was away at college away from family unable to leak out meaningful words from my pen. It was like her death sucked the life out of my creative ability to write beautiful prose. I would try and would end up hating what I wrote, so for a while I just stopped. It was a slow process but out of grief I pushed myself to return to the one thing that used to give me comfort. I fought through it and every now and then I am inspired and write something beautiful. It like she smiles down on me and returns life into my pen.
It's ironic even now 9 years later, I still struggle to write and share my poetry. It just doesn't come as easy as it used to. This post in particular has been in the "edit" field for over a month. I was hoping to end with a few lines of poetry....but its just not happening, at least not this time. I will continue to try and hope that one day my gift will leak out and once again fill the lines of my notebook with words that paint pictures and leave memories. Until then...I digress.
