I Answer with More Silence, a poem

Aleathia says:

Sometimes at night I can't sleep when everyone else is tucked in. This may be from so many years of working the overnight shift, but most of it is from anxiety. It has been a long time since I considered myself a writer. I just stopped doing it even though I loved it.  It ushered me through all of the most terrible things in my life except the most recent ones, the loss of my parents. Why did I choose this time to stop writing? When did I become uninspired to mark up the page and share my version of the world?

I used to think that misery and hardship were the driving forces behind poetry. The darkness within pushing out all the tasty morsels and ideas, but these last three years have the darkest of my life and the struggle to create words has been deep and seemingly unending. With the writing gone, the reading has moved out as well. It used to be my favorite escape and now it is hard to read for more than a few moments at a time. I have condemned myself to audio books and ADD.

The last month has been especially difficult for me watching my other half flourish with the written word. He is finding his voice again.  He is writing daily with purpose and this makes me happy, though I feel like I can't relate as much as I used to and it gives me a sense of complacency. We used to both love it so much. It was how we came together in the first place. I am well aware that people change. He and I may not always see writing in the same ways or love it the same as we used to. But I keep asking myself how I could lose something I did for 30 years of my life, almost daily? I'm not sure.  But this happened:

I Answer with More Silence

In the dark

I listen to the dog’s
jagged brand of snoring
In a minor chord
and out of sync
with the fan’s blades
cutting the air
and the thickness

of my melancholy.

Putting words to page

isn’t new to me

but feels foreign

and vicious

and subduing

at the same time.

The keys seem to ask

where have I been

and like any good mother,

why have I not called

in so long.

Aleathia Drehmer 2016