Age Appropriate Achievements from a Poet

A dear friend and talented poet wrote a poem about growing up and being a girl at 28. With her permission, I’ve published her work here.

Her poem is an honest account of girls that I admire who take the path less travelled. They are explorers of self-discovery, unabashedly denying the circumstances or situations that try to define them. They are orphans of lives that were not worthy of them to begin with. They are defenders of their options, frequently defying the gravitational pull of people’s thoughts and ideas of ‘what’s good for them’. If their words are polarized they are not rebels. If their thoughts are negative they are not oppressed.

I write to tell her story. A narrative about positive struggle, positive conflict, and the power of reflective thought and keen self-awareness. These thoughts and ideas are not for the cowardly but for the thought leaders, the leaders of empathy, and the role models that are honest, intentional, and genuine.

[Start]

across the street
my neighbours return from the cold
with their baby slung in place
and their dog running behind them.
…
they seem young
too young to live in a pre-colonial brownstone
where everyone looks like them.
28.

i am sitting in sweats trying to make ends meet:
if i don’t buy this, then i can afford that
if i save this much every month then i can have that
assurance
of a ‘safety net’
just in case
i don’t find a ‘job’ by…
28.

she gets rejection letters every day.
“While you are a suitably qualified candidate, we regret to
inform…
that paper you worked so hard for
isn’t worth the matchstick you would use to set it alight
and
all those dreams you stifled
and all those lives you denied yourself
in that paper chase
have drowned in rivers of ‘what-ifs’
what if I was….?
28.

she stays up in the night,
wandering.
love! love? love.
she searched
he never wanted to be found.
she trips
in a
tangled field of dreams
overgrown with mistletoe.
bells toll in the distance
to signal
the triumph of another
the disappointment of her mother
and
the fact that she is.
28.

[End]

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