Me and my poetry

For the past year, I became a good friend with a long lost friend, poetry. A friend that I firstly met in my Senior High School, with the Kahlil Gibran, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Soetardji Calzoum Bachri, Chairil Anwar, and other male poets at that time. A friend that I mostly met at the school library where I usually spent my breaks or no-teacher time. Horison was a literary magazine in that period of time, my regular reading. I watched Rangga, a character in a well known movie for teenagers, Ada Apa Dengan Cinta, who wrote poetry and I thought it was cool to be a nerd who could weave words into beautiful poems.

Sadly, all of my poems were destroyed. I did. Because most of my poems were about my struggles with my personal and religious problems during my senior high, about my broken home parents, about my cute puppy love (whom I ended before I go to college), about my questions of life, and so on. I thought that the poems were so cheeky, cheesy, and bad. I burned them all in my grandma's pawon, a traditional fire used for cooking. That was the most disappointing things I ever did. I was just afraid, at that time, that when I got married and my future husband would find my handwritten poems, he would get jealous or even got angry.

Since last year when I began my another academic journey, I started to write poems again. I had more time during my travels, my assignments from my university, or simply my weekly walk. I had more time to be alone, to be in total silence, to be in a lonesome, to be with my inner self. The urge to write poetry returned. I could not help it.

I wrote my poems and posted them on Instagram. You can read them all here. I love both: poems and pictures. Homesick might be my biggest cause to write again. I was relieving my longing to my mom, my daughter, my usual routines. It did help expressing my other dark side (when you are doing one single task for a very long period, you got your dark side: anger, boredom, unconfident).

To this day, I have posted around 200 poems, and many more that I haven't compiled. I had a hope to publish my Anthology one day, with the poems that I wrote for so many years.

Poetry becomes my safe haven. When I'm sad, disappointed, overly happy, worry, hurt, excited, whenever I feel strong emotion, I wrote poetry. Sometimes, I write it for the sake of reflection. I like observing the world outside myself and somehow try to put what am I in this world. Why my presence is meaningful, what can I do more, and so forth.

As the academic journey usually occupy mostly your left brain, poetry is a good medium to balance your right brain. Though, a good poetry might also need a great amount of left brain work, such as selecting the most appropriate word, the rhyme, rhythm, and tone. But for me, I did right brain work first, the flow of ideas, the let out. Then, I'll do the left brain work to edit, rephrase, and touch up.

Anyway, I wrote this in the middle of my data analysis and transcription. Wish me luck with my extensive data.

Your bubbly friend, Arnis.