Letters to a Young Poet X

September 27, 2018    
     
Ahavati      
The Future      
     
Dear Ahavati,      
     
     I write to you from the future, where I perceive you as just a baby, with so many lifetimes to evolve.  Here, in the Library of Light, where everything is recorded in your Book of Lives, I smile at your accomplishments, and the gift of poetry you have countless times chosen to procure a deeper understanding of . . .life, after life.      
     
     I see Autumn arrived under an umbrellic cloud-cover cooling the sun's volcanic wrath.  It's been a long, arid summer that holds on fiercely to what little time it has to survive.  The rivers are swollen from hurricane Florence, and the stagnancy in rogue pools has bred ravenous mosquitos.      
     
     I watched you film a circle of bats, their sonar pulse emitting a feeding frenzied frequency from a whirlpool of wings of air, their mouths ecstatically agape for the feast;  your childlike fascination was amazing to behold.  And your sadness over the nature of life: circular birth and death in the earthen realm, where everything is cyclic.        
     
     Right now, you think poetry mirrors seasons in its ability to adapt to the readers perception; that's an important point of this competition.  To delve deep into your intention:  why do you write; are you truly called to write.        
     
     Yes; you are.  It is drafted in volumes of blueprinted scrolls, crystal to our multifaceted view.   And somewhere inside you, amid the cloud of human armour, you know too.    
     
     You have questioned yourself, traveled back to your earliest memory of verse.  How it infiltrated your senses as a mother's milk: warm, nourishing to your spirit.  Remember the burst of enlightenment that accompanied the reading of it.  Or, how you carried it for years before locking it away in a trunk, filled with poems, stolen years later.        
     
     You wrote about everything you could imagine to challenge yourself: a blade of grass, coffee bean,  pasta noodle, even an apple seed.  Each subject took on new life, developed a soul, became a sentient being in your mind's eye.  You composed like there was no tomorrow because there wouldn't be enough to give life to every tangible object in the world: a grain of sand from the rock that tumbled  off the mountain in an avalance; a cottonwood seed carried across country in the grip of a thunder storm's breath.      
     
     In high school, what small amount of poetic time you were allotted, seemed mundane amid an atmosphere of flaccid classroom attention.  You were hardly given an intimate moment to bond with the works of great poets before being whisked off to conjugate a verb or dissect a paragraph.        
     
     You yearned for guidance in the art, an opportnity to expand knowledge, to delve into the psyche of poetic form and uncover its secret storage of existence.  You craved like-minded individuals whose blood was black from ink, those who knew the ancient language of the poem and had memorized the formation of its bones.  Who innately knew the hieroglyphics carved by life in its terracotta tomb. 
     
    With the exception of a few good teachers, college failed miserably to provide you with the connection you sought.  And before you realized, you were married, settling for the ordinary life with t-ball, PTA's, and dance instruction.  Not that you regret experiencing motherhood, nor being a wife.  It was a merely sense of displacement you could never shed despite how hard you tried to conform.      
     
     Society will tell you motherhood is the most natural aspect of being a woman.  And, you think perhaps they're right.  But, what about the most natural aspect of being human? What of that? There is but one common denominator for humanism despite being a child or adult, a parent or not, male or female ( gay, lesbian, or transgender ), and that is love. Love is the natural aspect of being human.      
     
     People pontificate that Love is a noun but it's not; it's a verb.  For you, it's poetry.   While you have enemies, allow me to remind you that you would have none if you were not going in the right direction.  The greater the battle the sweeter the reward, the deeper the verse from the archives of your soul; the one that remembers where you're from, and where you'll return to.      
     
     Ahavati, let this time in your life be a reminder that it is merely a preparation for the next life.  Remember how far you've come, and how much you've overcome.  Challenges are just that, and you have risen above despite attempts to distract your thoughts from the very treasure you seek: the poem.        
     
     You have not forsaken it, nor will it you.  Forget this not, as if you ever could. I know it would be impossible - and so do you.      
     
     Write right through them all, you unstoppable Survivor you.  You verse of Light; You Poem.  
     
     With Love from the future,  I remain      
     
     Always with you      
     
     
P.S.  You're smiling      
 
 
#RainerMariaRilke