Hi everyone,
Welcome to 365 Days of Poetry & Honesty! I hope this past week has been good to you <3 There are no collages this week, but I’ve included a couple of handwritten ones and, fingers-crossed, it's legible.
I hope you enjoy and please let me know what your thoughts are!
Monday
A love poem to start the week. I was thinking about language, about how love poems are often coded with gender-specific words and images, and I hopefully wrote something free of all that.
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
The art piece is ‘Mountain Range, 1978’ by Yayoi Kusama. When I first saw it I thought the title was ‘Mountain Range & Honeycomb’, but now I think I must've seen it, had the thought wow that looks like honeycomb, and it became fact. With that in mind, I wrote the poem because I was thinking what a strange and interesting association, what is she trying to say or rather how does this piece make me feel, and then I thought about this quote I’d put down earlier from a Canadian crime drama called ‘Coroner’. Jenny, the coroner, is in a session with her therapist, and I can't remember the context, but he says “the place where you stop is where you need to push through”. At first I was thinking about my dissertation but I saw this piece and I thought I’d probably stop at the sight of these great big mountains, but it's honeycomb, it's honey, push through, sweeter things. And I wrote this. Despite the mix-up, I think it still stands.
Friday
This poem makes me smile :) I think it's sweet & playful and I hope it make you smile too.
Saturday
I hope you can read my writing. Apologies for the particularly thick ‘y’ at the end lol.
Sunday
I read ‘The Death of Vivek Oji’ by Akwaeke Emezi and it broke my heart. The death is there is in the title, but the story, the way Emezi’s crafts lives & writes love, the way one’s pride and ego can be destructive to the people you love, it broke my heart. And I was thinking about love, what it feels like to love someone hard knowing that love could see you murdered. And I was thinking about how the story writes itself because we know what kind of endings are available, or have been made available to people in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly in certain countries in Africa, like Nigeria, where the book is set. And I was thinking about how it's awful to not be able to talk about the person you love, particularly if they’re gone. How some people have to grieve silently because the shame at the hands of others is too much to bear. I don't think it's fair and it's my prayer that people have the freedom to express their love and to express their truth. And being able to make those things known also allows other people to maybe see themselves, to have themselves validated. This world is deeply unfair and I want there to be change. So I wrote this, about being able to shout your love from the rooftops.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter ! <3 Let me know which one was your favourite, or if you have any comments/feedback in general :)
With love,
Oyinda