Author Archives: Elea Lee
When I was younger
I used to write either to process grief, hold onto God, or take pictures with words.
I wrote poetry to hide and survive
Hide the full story
Survive the storm
Or whatever…
When you are 22 you want to be famous and loved
Now I understand better why I write one way or another
Prose is the plodding slow reward of a clean house
Poetry is a fencing match
A race against prose
Say something
Before it is too late
Try writing ordinary things
As poems
A fight with someone you love?
A grocery list
Acknowledges the power
Of the smallest things
We can
Take for granted
Survivor.
Image
John 21
Image
A new thing…
So I finally put the WP app on my phone. I marginally publicize this blog because well, I am not a very good salesperson. So I am going to write a novel on my other blog.
Using the app
Yay WordPress!
Check it out if you are bored…
It is called “time flows down”
And it’s gonna be messy<3
Give me a new country
Uncock the gun
Release the bullets
Into the palm of your hand
Put the weapon down
Smash it into pieces
Sown into earth
Like the teeth of the mythical
Dragon
Pull down the walls
Release the lions
They will feed now
On grass like the Lamb
Who has tamed them
Undo all the damage
Unleashed by thIs savage
Heart next to
A river, next to a Tree
At the center of this new country
For Mary Htoo
We talk short words
The argot of binary code
Words and symbols you know better than me
Girlchild
My other daughter
Wish I could keep you close
Through storms and sun and boredom
All the days
A reminder of things
Beyond my reach
Things we take for granted
Light, for instance
Poured out like a drink offering
Through trees in the summer sky
Why is it following me? The boy asks
Because it loves you
His mother speaks of metonymy
And the moon?
Why does it follow me?
Same reason, of course
Love.
A free speech issue
A woman on a plane objects to forced proximity to pornography and is told she has no support. She must endure another person’s objectional material. Which is, btw, degrading and offensive to women.
No one comes to her aid, and the NYTimes walks on egg shells when they report it.
A respectable American businessman who practices fair, nondiscriminatory hiring and follows his conscience in his business is vilified because he has the temerity to exercise his first amendment right to say he supports a traditional view of marriage.
Guy has a right to talk
But…
The truth is that one of the major reasons the marriage argument is huge and important is that millions of Americans live in fear because of hate. Hate kills, maims, tortures, intimidates, and dehumanizes people. Just because of their sexual identity.
No person in this country should have to hide who they are because they are afraid of violence.
No person should be the target of violence because they are gay or transgendered.
We have to start with that.
We have to build from the ground up.
Love requires it.
I broke my own rule
One time in the same week I wrote a letter to someone and a poem to someone else. Both someones had behaved badly. My intrepid partner (always the English major) told me he liked the poem more than the letter.
Of course, I thought. Poetry is the marble colonade you hide in when followed by ghosts or splendor. A letter is an everyday thing. Too blunt to be art. But is any of this about Art?
No. Not really. It is about sanctuary and splendor. Borrowed safety and borrowed beauty.
And attempting however obliquely to suggest the existence of Absolute Love.
So I violated my own rule about my other blog– called etiology. I told myself I would keep etiology free of my obsession with grief and injustice and the anger that follows these things.
I once wrote a poem I cannot see myself publishing. Too painful, too personal. I once wrote a letter to C’s prison therapist which simply described C’s crimes from what his victims and witnesses had said. Just the facts, as they say. The therapist read it and said he read my anger.
Anger? I thought. That was just the facts. I wonder what he would think if he saw my angry letter.


