According to WordPress, this blog turned five years old on Sunday. I don’t really know how much I believe that, but then I refuse to believe five years ago was 2010. Seriously, don’t correct me on that, five years ago was 2005.
Regardless of whether or not this is entirely accurate, five years is still one hell of a milestone and I’m honestly surprised I kept up a blog that received its baptismal blessing in the form of a Year 11 English teacher (it was an assignment for my IGCSE First Language English class). I don’t like going back through this blog all that much – I have enough of retrospect as is without having to parse through my own words – but it’s reassuring to know it’s out there. Far more reassuring than the existence of 75% of my other social media platforms.
I’ve been reading a lot of Kierkegaard lately in the form of a little anthology comprising his journals and essays and seminal works; I love reading journals and letters written by my favorite thinkers because I’m that pompous ass and because it explores what is a distinct beauty in their very musing, a grace in the core of their self. Allow me to indulge my fantasy: in an ideal future, I’d love to be the kind of person whose “journal” and correspondence inspires and is widely circulated because it’s believed that I have something of value to say, and that there’s merit to my first draft thoughts so to speak. Now I doubt that that would be the case. And there’s very little romance to sharing links. And I think I’m the only idiot who still writes letters out of sentimental value on occasion.
(To my future publisher: I do have a journal. It’s not worth it except for scribbled down poems and maybe a proper entry here and there. And a few of half-decent drawings. Ask for it at your own discretion. I’ll probably have thrown it away though. Also, my handwriting isn’t all that pretty so it’s not even worth it for the aesthetic value.)
Now that I’m done destroying any chance I might ever have of being a published fauxlosopher, here’s some poetry.
She is Demeter and she begets life in grain,
singing gospels heavenward, lulling
summer haze into autumn still.
She is Isis, knee-deep in Nile delta fertility,
silt and salt reaching out to caress the way
only children adoring a mother can.
She is Gaia and the world sways to her hips,
yet you talk of orbits as if she isn’t guiding this earth
with the beat of her heliocentric heart?
She is Leah, of the wide weary eyes,
and she births gardens for prophets and
bears biblical burdens that the world could never know.
Life was never limited to just one woman.
not always a goddess – 9/22
O Anachronism,
do you yearn
for romance, the space for thought,
the time to breathe?
– do you ache to see the
stars, to read the moon, to
seal your words in wax?
Do not fret, Beloved:
words can get lost in transit,
the stars never left you,
and when are you more aware of your heart
than in the midst of breathlessness?
There is no romance more passionate than changing the world.
for the discomfit heart – 9/16
hold fast to me, lover.
we are july in the dark
sweltering under sheets
perspiration like adrenaline and our kisses
condense so hot that we shiver
and when this tempest brings monsoon frenzies that dissipate into autumn, don’t fret:
we will have hot summer nights to remind us of each other
july
Neiha Lasharie 