Kammii+Hudson

=WELCOME TO HIME-SAMA'S POETRY= =“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”= =[|Paul Valery]=

When I write my poetry, I like to have a flow and feel to it. Line breaks make a big difference when I write my poems. I write my poetry and line break them a certain way so that when a reader reads my poetry they can hear it in their head the same way that I do. When I write poetry I like there to be a meaning behind it so when I write, my poetry comes from my heart. Even if I write a poem about another person or thing, I put myself in their shoes, look through their eyes and then try to capture the essence of them into my poetry. Most of the poems I write focus around emotions because depending on how I feel you could get a fun and happy poem or a sad and depressing poem it all depends on my mood really.

I like to make my poems rhyme when I write them although I don’t always make the rhyming words come at the end of the line as people expect it to be. I tend to rhyme the end of a line with the first word of the line to follow simply because it flows and sound better when read aloud. When I write poetry a like to do sonnets and free verse although every once in while I write Epics. I think my favorite type of poetry are the epics because they’re just stories written in a poetic form. When I write epics, I get to use all my creative writing skills all at once. It’s challenging but it feels good when I complete them.

An Ode to Purpose The thing that wills me to awaken in the morning The thing that wills me to try The thing that wills me to push myself to do things that I'd like to quit on You are the thing I aspire for You are the thing I wish to have before I die To live my entire life without you would be Not to live at all You are something to look up to For everyone wants you Yet not everyone can seem to find you Even when you stare them dead in the face You are wonderful. For you make the world what it is Without you there would be no meaning to anyone or thing One day I'll touch you One day I'll feel you One day I will claim and own you as my own I will find my purpose.

Sonnet The blue bird sings a grey song of soft tears De-signed to over flow an emp-ty heart Ar-dent feel-ings en-graved at the base here In-ner walls of this pith need a jump start Like a me-tem-psy-cho-sis, revive this Re-an-i-mate an ill-treat-ed passion Once re-splen-dent, now owned by those remiss Ex-empt her from the cur-bings of her ere Em-it the veiled en-dow-ment from with in Let this blue bird dissolve into the air Be-com-ing a new and No lon-ger dim

I was raised by

I was raised by a strong hold of six Small family built on trust, love, religion and humor More so,

I was raised by intellect believing that having an understanding is the greatest thing I can have

I was raised by anime and manga Sailor moon dancing through my dreams Planting a lifetime's supply of imagination into me

I was raised by the arts Entire family sketching in the spare time Isn't fair how No matter how hard any of us try we'll never draw as amazing as my dad Music flowing through my mother's veins as is she were a living instrument and Her love for a melody has seemed to flow down to me

I was raised on fried chicken, collard greens, macaroni and baked patatoes Homemade food which made coming home feel so good

I was raised by afternoon wrestling with my older brother Never manging to overthrow him yet never smart enough to stop trying Never denying myself the minuscule possibility of winning

I was raised by "one day" and "just wait" Because everything I want My parents said soon enough I'll have and So I keep wait for that "one day"

To Lose my Baby Teeth

They grow in when we’re babies Just being our lives And their purpose is to Teach and groom To get us used To using them The life I live right now is only temporary It’s grooming me and teaching me how to Live my real life The way I am now is small and weak and This me is only me for a moment For soon this me will get loose and fall away And then a newer, stronger me will grow into its place. I can keep her in a jar and try to preserve her but eventually she’ll die away And after a while, I’ll forget I ever knew her

A Book said Dream and I Do - Barbra Ras

There were feathers and the light that passed through feathers. There were birds that made the feathers and the sun that made the light. The feathers of the birds made the air soft, softer than the quiet in a cocoon waiting for wings, stiller than the stare of a hooded falcon. But no falcons in this green made by the passage of parents. No, not parents, parrots flying through slow sleep casting green rays to light the long dream. If skin, dew would have drenched it, but dust hung in space like the stoppage of time itself, which, after dancing with parrots, had said, Thank you. I'll rest now. It's not too late to say the parrot light was thick enough to part with a hand, and the feathers softening the path, fallen after so much touching of cheeks, were red, hibiscus red split by veins of flight now at the end of flying. Despite the halt of time, the feathers trusted red and believed indolence would fill the long dream, until the book shut and time began again to hurt

In this poem, the author gives it’s reader a beautiful serene image and then at its end she zooms the reading out even further to revealer a darker, grander picture. She begins with a feather and expands from it. She zooms out from the feather, making a chain in expanding views as if letting us look at a window with blinds and then slowing raising them so we can see a little more and more as she takes us through the poem. Then it narrows down to the feather again. It gives this kind of nice feeling as if you’ve had a fulfilling day and now it’s coming to a comfy close. Then just as it closes, the writer zooms away from the entire poem to bring you out of it in a sense. “Despite the halt of time, the feathers trusted red and believed indolence would fill the long dream, until the book shut and time began again to hurt” In these last three lines, she reveals the sadder side of the poem. This poem toys with its readers emotions a little. It’s beautiful and relaxing but then it curves at the end and turns the whole thing depressing. This poem puts in you this beautiful world that you can get lost into and then at the end it gets pulled from under you in a sense because she reveals to us that it was all unreal.

You can’t Have It All – But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this.

“You Can’t have it All” is a very interesting poem because it uses a lot of contrast and symbolism to get across the point that although we can’t have everything we want, there’s always going to be an alternative or substitute for our desires. She directs the poem at a certain person using examples from a certain person life but the theme behind the poem pertains to everyone who reads it. The poem was designed as a “Keep your head up” kind of thing where who ever reads it can think, “although I can’t do that, I can still do this, this, and this.” “And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas” says a line from the poem. This line acts as a prime example of how although one thing may give out on you, there will always be something else that you can fall back on.

Washing the Elephant

Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon’s light fuelling the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize your parents in Heaven,” instead of “Being one with God will make your mother and father pointless.” That was back when I was young enough to love them absolutely though still fear for their place in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess, to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder, Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence. Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden. So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were, the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest— the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly, unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things like popsicles unthinkingly. And though dailiness may have no place for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life will appear in a dream, arriving with the weight and certitude of an elephant, and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.

“Washing the Elephant” by Barbara Ras is a very complicated poem that takes the tone of child. Throughout the poem she takes on a childish tone by having this constant feel of curiosity and a lack of understanding about why things were. She uses imagery well with her poem to explain her disarray. , describing scenes from her past where she thought to herself “why” or “what if”. Like this line from the poem : What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize your parents in Heaven,” instead of “Being one with God will make your mother and father pointless.” Her point in writing this line was to show a situation where she looked at something and couldn’t understand why it was done a certain way. Her poem shows how children can’t seem to understand why things are the way they are but as they grow along the move away from the inquiry and step towards acceptance.