It’s wild how poems come back around sometimes. I wrote this one in a local pub for a friend of mine while we were hanging out. I hammered out the drafts on the white space in some free newspapers that happened to be in the pub. She took the whole stack of drafts, said she was intrigued by the process, and wanted to remember it.
I’m grateful that I took a picture of it, at least. I needed this poem today. For myself, this time.
I wrote the poem for her because she was struggling with some major life transitions at the time: finishing up her Master’s program, leaving her husband, moving into a new apartment with her 8-year-old daughter… It all felt like too much all at once to her at the time.
She made it through, of course. Life has a way of spilling out of the containers we try to keep it confined in. I’m thinking it’s time to give up on the containers and just let it flow from here on out.