writing

Write It

/ erin mount / 4 Comments

While I was on my blogging hiatus, I actually started another blog. Contradictory, right? It was a blog that I wanted to devote solely to “real” writing (whatever that means). I wrote a total of 3 entries. I guess I’m better at “fake” writing. Ha. 🙂 One thing that did come out of that failed blog was rediscovering my love of poetry. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about poetry:

Poetry was my first love. I remember learning about poetry in fourth grade and going home and scribbling line after line of it, practically drunk with the thrill of finding a rhyme. I remember being ecstatic when my teacher read one of my poems aloud (I believe it began: “Fish, fish in the blue sea,/Please come out and play with me”), and I filled notebooks with poems, then stories and the beginnings of novels. I know that I am not a good poet, but I do love to shape words into lines and stanzas.

I’ve said before that poetry is like chocolate for the soul, and I really do think that. There are few things so satisfying as reading a well-crafted poem.

Though it’s not well-crafted, I thought I would share a poem I wrote this summer and have not edited since. Reader be warned: mediocrity ahead!

Together Separate

In a haze of pain and glory, you enter
the world, your cry filling the room
and my heart at once. I look on you,
flesh of my flesh, and marvel. You seem familiar
and yet a stranger.  My fingers fumble as I try to feed you,
your eyes closed and shut away. I do not know
how to do this.

Through the blur of midnight wakings,
unceasing cries, spit-upon articles of clothing,
I look down and realize I love you, though you
know nothing of love yet, only the basic rhythms of
life.  I gaze into your eyes, find myself lost in their trusting depths,
and we are both newly born.

Do you have a favorite poem? Share it with me!

Five Minute Friday: Real

/ erin mount / 5 Comments

{I’m participating in Gypsy Mama’s Five Minute Friday for the first time. It was really hard to stick to that 5 minute limit. And I may have done a little deleting, but I will do better next time!}

~

We are a society obsessed with reality TV. You don’t have to flip too many channels to find some reality program on. But those shows? They’re not real.

If you were to ask me if I have a problem “being real,” I would tell you no. But I would be lying. As much as I pride myself on being real on my blog and in person, I am often anything but. I like to self-edit, pick and choose those parts of me that are most likely to be accepted, most likely to be praised.

Sometimes I don’t even know how to be real anymore.

I stick the not-so-lovely bits in a dark place and hope they never come to light. I worry that if I finally muster the courage to be truly real, if I truly bare it all, then I will scare everyone away. So I keep those bits tucked away and wonder why I’m lonely.

Being real is scary. Being real is vulnerable. But being real can also be freeing, and who couldn’t use a little more freedom in their life?

I think of the lyrics, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” and think that I’ve been doing an awful lot of hiding under a bushel. It’s time to let the light in. It’s time to be real.

Stuck

/ erin mount / 6 Comments

So I kind of don’t know what to do with this blog. I’m having a blog identity crisis, I guess. I don’t really feel much like writing about weight loss since I’m not weighing very frequently and even when I do, I’m not having dramatic losses. It’s kind of hard to have a “weight loss blog” without the weight loss, don’t you think? I also am struggling with the fact that in January, I will have been blogging about losing weight for four years. Is that inspiring? I mean, who wants to read about a woman who’s been trying to lose weight for the better part of FOUR YEARS and still hasn’t reached her goal? I’m pretty sure that timeline of progress is not going to get me on a talk show anytime soon, unless the topic is slowest losers.

The other thing I blog about most is Charlotte, and while I of course love posts about Charlotte, I’m not foolish enough to think everyone else is completely enamored with my daughter. I worry about posting too much about her and boring everyone (although let’s face it, she’s the cutest thing on the face of the earth, and no, I’m not biased).

So where does this leave me?

I have no idea.

What does everyone think?

To Take What We Love Inside

/ erin mount / 5 Comments

The first time I read this poem, I read it again. And again. I adore Li-Young Lee. His love of words pours from every line of his writing, and when I read his poems I am swept up in the fervor. Read his words, and then read them again.

From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee
published in Rose

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee gave a reading during my last semester as an undergrad, and he also hosted a writers’ workshop afterwards. He read one of my poems during that workshop and offered his comments and even a bit of praise. It was one of the most surreal, proudest moments of my life. I need to read poetry more often. I used to read it almost every day, but I slowly got out of the habit. I used to write poems almost every day as well, but that was before grad school squelched any ounce of creativity I possessed. I want the poet in me to come back. I want the writer in me to come back. “O, to take what we love inside…”