I wanted to take some time to look at the evolution of my poetry thus far. I feel as though the only proper way to do so is by looking at my earliest documented poetry. I have one giant document online with all of my poetry ever written stored on it, numbered chronologically. When I write poetry, I either type it straight into the document or I will write it out in paper first and type it up later. Due to this, I know for a fact that there are at least a couple of poems that I have written that are not uploaded on the document. But anyways, now, I will show a few of my earliest poems, taken straight from my document:

1. Empty Autumn

A leaf falls

others follow

They all come down

‘Till none others can follow

And the tree feels hollow

3. But What of Snow?

Crystals of white fall

Cold and frigid, delicate

Yet, there are many

6. The Calling Night

The dark begins to grow

The light begins to sew

The moon comes out

The sun’s a drought

Yet effluent beauty unfolds

We can see that I did not have great capacities for long, meaningful poems at this stage. This was the beginning of my freshman year of high school. We can also see that right from the start I was interested in writing about nature. I was also a fan of rhyming and formatted poetry, as noted by the plentiful limericks and haikus I have written. I knew that great poems are rarely haikus or limericks, and I wished to write great poems. This is not to say that haikus and limericks can’t be great poems, but if you read my first post about the poetic topics, you will understand what I mean. Anyways, I aspired to write better, and so, with little knowledge of how to write well and no experience, I began to write. And I wrote some long things, some short things, some nonsensical things, and rather straightforward things, not very much so beautiful or profound. I was making progress but I could not see it at the time. Here are some of my early experiments:

16. What We Are

I watch the star

A gazing fire

Deep and strong

Living long

I see the fog

That blinds me deep

It's beginning to seep

Into the cracks

And I see stars

That take my soul

I feel the warmth

I taste the cold

The world waits along

The dying stars

And life unfolds

Time unravels

Very far

Way too deep

Into the cracks

That opened quick

And see the light

Of dying stars

Because isn't that

What we are

I watch the sky

Midnight jackets

Aurora scarves

And moonlight pendants

Past this meaning

Further still

And into cracks

So deep to fill

The stars die through

Reborn again

A cycle that will never end

Yet cracks are dark

And stars are bright

So fill they try

With honored might

But mist blows past

The gazing view

And back again

I am pushed out

Ostracized by

Other doubt

But isn't that

What we are

I grasp the void

A peace so deep

So like the cracks

So hard to fill

With dying light

And gusts of truth

Blow through the mist

And see, I can

Feeling so serene

Calm and overtaken

By this normal day

When tsunamis may crash

And hurricanes

People still smile

Out of love, out of hope

Every moment a treasure

Silver crowns may tarnish

But stars die in fashion

They fade with a flash

And as they are reborn again

The mist comes through

Obscuring you

And isn't that

What we are

A king of gold

So malleable

A presence too soft

But crowns of silver

Bright and regal

Fill the sky

Tarnishing

Into the lie

That life just stops

And so we were

But mist blew past

And stars were bright

The crack was fading

In the morning light

But dawning still

Yet to come

Midnight stretching

Past the sun

And other stars

filled the sky

All have come

But all are leaving

Time has pulled them

Through the cracks again

Let light shine

As they go down

Pieces of return

Fragments of the Universe

Because isn't that

What we are

21. Light through Leaves

Scattering the diamond sky

Through the fragile fingers green

As these beautiful statues cry

Down upon thy sprouts to meet

Altering the daylight’s présence

Keeping holy yonder shade

The works of greatness house these holes

That let the sun smile down to grass

And under swept the leaves that pass

And love shines forward, and darkness bade

For in the pits that many fear

A journey forms, a soul to reap

The bark grows thick to comfort all

The giant, protector pedestal

Those branches reach to make new friends

Embracing all the air to day's end

And leaves try hard, to work and grow

Yet their mistakes will always shine through

Light through leaves, the golden hue

We can see here there is a sense of curiosity I have with language itself. In my older works, I often found myself rhyming because I wanted to rhyme, and using words because I liked the words, with no greater purpose or idea guiding me. It was a linguistic miracle that any of my early poems turned out okay. I consider these two poems to be some of my stepping-stone poems where I can see visible growth in my style and abilities. I am able to write long bits with theme and flow, I use recurring imagery, I am descriptive but not too descriptive, I begin to feel the poems as they come out of me. The biggest issue as a young writer, as may be obvious, is how vague I was. Besides the vocabulary and formatting (because I often forced rhyme and did not go into poems with particular formatting schemes in mind, used words that I knew from some of my inspirations in writing and attempted to make my poetry sound better than it was, and developed the poem often in very segmented ways in terms of its intrinsic flow and format), the poems themselves did not go anywhere. “What We Are” goes on forever, albeit with occasional good imagery. The overall idea of the poem is not bad, just the execution. And so here, I begin formulating ideas of what I want my poems to be. I start the planning and editing process naturally, without being taught to do so. I had tried so hard to be greater than I was that I forgot how to be me. And that is what this process was all about, finding me and my voice. In the following poems, you will be able to see the birth of what I would consider to be “my voice”:

18. The Dancing Grassland

O’er silver skies per autumn days

And ‘tween the clouds and shadows’ stays

The green tsunami everlasting

Tickling the air with tongues of green

And up upon the trees, are casting

Darkness, shadows, strewn abroad

Wind breaks through this summer yawn

And dances with the tongues of green

And tastes the grassland dancing ‘tween

With feet dug deep beneath the body

Stuck in place, not free, but moving

Each are holding each other's hands

All in all, the dancing grassland

65. Waters of Sight

Unto love I stared, and see

The colors of true love reborn

The darkest ocean, brightest sea

A blue of which has no sojourn

In my life of love and mys’try

Inside the eye that hides my faith

Hides the waters of my sight

They hold me, calm me, stop my wraith

Of rampages and hateful midnight

When the darkness eats my sight 

I wonder what abides in water

Calmed by love of blue galore

If it may, of me, help or harm

The love caged in thy blue core

Calming, glooming, which will bore?

In the eye that captured oceans

And strapped down all the seven seas

I will find the waters of sight

With which I can disinquire

A life of truest passion’s fight

And sail with love on heaven’s seas

“The Dancing Grassland” is one of my absolute favorite and oldest poems. It is simple and well put together. It is nothing crazy, but that is good. I just tried to write through myself, not above myself. It is also one of my earliest poems in which my rhyming does not feel forced. It took a long time to notice what it looks and feels like when rhyme is forced, and to be able to point it out. I also started to use better word choice and formatting, as we can see with “Waters of Sight”. I also played more with punctuation, which is not something I do often, even now. We can begin to see semblances of my voice, which I would describe as playful, archaic, rich, and abstract. The fact that I came from my first poem to some of my recent poems which I consider to be masterpieces, some of them as long as 3 or 4 pages, is astounding to me. The fact that I did this mostly on my own as well. I have gotten very slight feedback from family members and I have also worked with some English and Creative Writing teachers on my poetry, but nothing major. While I was able to do most of the work and growth on my own, I am thankful for those who were there for me when I needed help. And now, I am proud of who I have become as a writer, and I am looking forward to see how I grow and change.