Author: Khadija
Dream Life/Real Life
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>I’ve been digging through my old journals looking for some material for my research proposal. While some of the poetry I found there, left me wondering how the paper it was written on didn’t curl up in embarrassment for having to shelter such drivel, this poem I quite like,
Traitorous Tears
With only my own
arms expending
to encompass me,
I curl up,
cornered,
into recoiling cold,
dwarfed by dirty-pink detachment
A pink towel
muffles
my draining gasps
my insurmountable fear
my infinitesimal voice.
‘A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out expression; an effort to find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.’ Robert Frost
Words to live by
“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”
Ben Okri (Nigeria)