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

Lit Bits-9/17/2014 Anne Sexton

Aleathia says:

When I first came onto the small press poetry scene I was grossly naive about poetry.  I had been writing it my whole life, but only for the comfort of my soul.  A friend had suggested that I try to get published.  This idea frightened me really.  It is such a hard concept knowing you will put out the most secret and tender parts of yourself for others to read and judge.  That is what poetry is about, isn't it?

Over the years I have learned that staying true to ones self is important.  If you get published you shouldn't be writing for an audience or so that you will continue to get published.  Write because you want to, because you have to.  Along this journey I have been introduced to so many different established poets.  In the poetry scene there seems to be certain poets that you are supposed to admire no matter what.  Anne Sexton is one of those poets.

Why wouldn't they want to love her?  She was beautiful and commanding...cool and sophisticated. She was a time bomb of mental illness waiting to go off.  She was confessional and let it all hang out hiding nothing from the reader.  That sort of power is very attractive to young minds.  Her life ended in suicide, wrapped in her mother's fur coat, in the family garage.

I have some of her work though most of it is wholly unpalatable to me.  As a reader she often gives too much for me.  She doesn't allow for me to use my imagination much.  I do however like this poem:

The Silence

My room is whitewashed,

as white as a rural station house

and just as silent;

whiter than chicken bones

bleaching in the moonlight,

pure garbage, 

and just as silent.

There is a white statue behind me

and white plants

growing like obscene virgins,

pushing out their rubbery tongues

but saying nothing.

My hair is the one dark.

It has been burnt in the white fire

and is just a char.

My beads too are black,

twenty eyes heaved up

from the volcano,

quite contorted.

I am filling the room 

with words from my pen.

Words leak out of it like a miscarriage.

I am zinging words out into the air

and they come back like squash balls.

Yet there is silence.

Always silence.

Like an enormous baby mouth.

The silence is death.

It comes each day with its shock

to sit on my shoulder, a white bird,

and peck at the black eyes

and the vibrating red muscle

of my mouth.