Summer is nearly here and I still have so much love to give.
Years and years go by as I wonder why
I am still single.
Is it my ability to mingle?
Am I really that incompetent at starting up
A single conversation?
Is it my hesitation?
The way I wait until it’s nearly too late
Before I open up to say
“Hello, my name is
Why do I wait?
This apparent appearance of desperation
Is the reason that I fear a relationship
Play patience.
It’s a fake, it’s pretend, it’s a toy,
A pretty plastic fruit, a hollow decoy.
How it tastes so sweet
As if it fell to me straight from the tree
No need for me to do a thing.
But when the patience is devoured At the final hour
I just taste the sour end
Lamen’ potential friends.
Let me be a rushing river, A cheerful giver,
Not afraid to stand and deliver,
A Rio Grande lover.
Let me crash, heart-first
Into the earth
Unrelenting
Unapologetic
Unrepenting
I don’t want to be alone in the pain,
A pawn in a game,
I want to find life in the rain.
I haven’t got the want to be a lone wolf
My heart empty
As I empty out into in the gulf.
I’d rather die having run myself dry
Than be so full of myself and my supply
I return to the sky.
I’d rather be condemned for loving too much
Than be punished by my conscience if
It wasn’t enough.
I’d rather love above.
Easier said than done.
If I, for one, am being honest,
I am still a work in progress.
I am caught in a miserable dance
With Fear, and it smiles as it clutches my hands.
But every once in a while it will let me go
When its grip has gotten weary and it’s lost its hold.
It is then I decide if I will take my chance
Or if I’ll bite again the fruit and then go back to dance.
“My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has been mindful of the humble state of His servant.” Luke 1:46-48a
I wrote this poem for a project for my poetry class. I want to preface the next section of this caption by saying that I wrote it about a month ago, largely paraphrased from the description I turned in alongside the poem. Since then, my life has changed a bit, and I think I am the happiest I’ve been in years. I’ve found a group of friends whose I company I genuinely enjoy and with whom I can be my true self around. This poem and the friends I’ve made are a long-awaited answered prayer.
(I know I’ll be showing this poem to them in the future, and I can already hear some of them saying “aww” as they read this lol. To my friends, thank you for being you and for being in my life. Even if only for a short while, thank you for the time we’ve spent together ❤.)
For this poem, I drew direct inspiration from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s book Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande. In his poetry, Baca often includes themes such as love for people, love for friends, praising of the Rio Grande, and wanting to be like the Rio Grande. He also frequently uses elements of nature as symbols and metaphors. In my poem “To Love Like A River,” I wanted to include these same themes while incorporating my own personal experiences and my own poetry style.
I typically write poems about what I feel, usually pertaining to a specific person or a specific situation in which I find myself. This poem is different in that it’s more about how I want to love other people. Not any one specific person, but rather people as a whole, friends and strangers included. I also deliberately included natural imagery, specifically of the Rio Grande, to point back to the work by which I was inspired. Even though the poem was inspired by many of the elements from Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande, the meaning behind the poem is very much genuine and from my own heart. Writing this truly helped me to release some of the weight I’d been carrying about this topic, giving me some much-needed mental and emotional clarity.
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