Home,
the place I want to be,
the place that’s meant for me,
the place I cannot see.

Time,
is never on my side,
no matter how I’ve tried,
there’s freedom I’m denied.

And I’ll be back again
it’s all part of the plan
and I promise to come home,
I’ll never be alone,
and I’ll be back where I belong.

hope,
is sometimes overrated
when you’re angered and frustrated,
when you’re feeling low and hated.

faith,
the focal point of all things,
that raises you on its wings,
that dangles you on its strings.

And I’ll be back again
it’s all part of the plan
and I promise to come home,
I’ll never be alone,
and I’ll be back where I belong. Continue reading →

Poem #1 “For Your Love”:

In this poem, I only used words from the last two sentences of my chosen books (Candide and Nightwood) and last two lines from my chosen poems (Incubus, I Prize the Memory, 833). Since my overall framework discusses individuals losing their loved ones, I decided to choose words out of only two sentences from the end of a text, as a way to illuminate that during a loss of love, there are two lovers who reach the end of their relationship:

Eyes bloodshot, crying

A reservoir of tears

For your love

 

Passed upon your way

For your love

 

Roamed America

On foot

For your love

 

Your love,

A thrust of sword

Through the heart

 

We must give up,

You said.

Lost all your love

Expelled from your love

 

Lying here, crying

For your love

 

Poem #2 “Loss”:

Lastly, I created a freestyle poem as a way to end my creative piece signifying that once a person overcomes the pain from losing a loved one, a sensation of acceptance and happiness overcomes them. This sensation allows them to finally feel “free” instead of feeling confined in a cycle unbearable pain:

Your laugh echoes in my mind

Your touch lingers onto my skin

Your love was nothing but toxic flames

Burning up from within

 

The intoxication of your love

Has left me clinging on for more

Just as you surrendered and disappeared

Leaving my mind and heart to go to war

 

As I sit here and mourn

Over the absence of your beautiful body

I know one night this tragic voyage

Will finally allow me to breathe, to embody.

For my creative piece, I decided to build a sentence using 10 random words that I found in each text. The theme of my anthology is based on women’s restrictive role in society, so I decided to restrict my writing by creating a sentence based only on the ten words that I chose from each text.

 

• Nightwood (page 49):

Powerful, calm, stubborn Robin; she strangely conceived her child alone.

• Bewitched (page 642):

Manago, spectral monster, convinced Toyo-o to pledge eternal love.

• Candide (page 89):

Cunegonde: her part was to marry, have children, wash dishes.

• Sonnet “445”:

They could easily shut wise girl in prose for treason.

• The Laugh of the Medusa (page 876):

And time again, women write, invent, inscribe, beautiful unacknowledged production.

Enlightenment (lowercase “e”)

 

Hunger, thirst, lust

Desire, want, need

Aristotle from Greece, Beethoven on piano,

Voltaire through enlightenment, Pollock with cigarette

Reaching, trying to amount, achieve, attain

Without which there is nothing, unhappiness, lacking from nowhere about nothing only blackness, darkness, justified with emptiness

They who have tasted, sipped, felt, can’t let go – no

Longing, desire, insatiable hanker

Like the self-believed intellectual, nicotine addicted – apprentice alcoholic

More arrogant than Leonidas at Hell’s Gates

Criticizing, mocking and ungrateful – reaches

At last, for Aquinas

What is beauty?

It’s sure not me

When I look in the mirror, all I see

Is a reflection of imperfections and problems that need to be fixed

I can’t really remember the last time or even a time

When my skin was perfect

All I remember are the same questions and remarks people made:

“Oh my god, what happened to your face?”

“Do you wash your face enough?”

“Don’t touch your face so much, you’ll make it worse!”

“Here’s a remedy I read about online, I’ll forward it to your mom”

These people that constantly made these remarks

They weren’t just random people I’d never see again

They were my relatives: my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, even my own mother

Everyday, I struggled to meet their definition of beauty,

To be beautiful in their eyes

I used lightening cream to be “whiter”

I used every homemade remedy out there to get rid of the one problem that stared back at me

And still nothing….

It only got worse to the point where it physically hurt to move my face

Acne was winning, and me, I was losing to a battle that I was fighting for way too long

This idea that beauty had power over me,

A power that I couldn’t escape

Until I finally got rid of all the weight on my shoulders,

The weight of expectations that weren’t ever mine,

I stand in front of you today,

Nowhere near perfect,

But better

I stand here today,

with scars from my battle against Beauty,

Scars,

That serve as a daily reminder

That what I see in the mirror,

Isn’t a reflection of imperfections and problems that need fixing,

But rather a reflection of all that I conquered and survived through.

Dear Candide,

Hope this letter reaches you wherever you may be in the world embarking on another exciting journey. I was saddened to hear that you have been expelled from your home. But, you know what, when one door closes, another opens. Maybe this trip to somewhere uncharted will help you figure out where you truly belong. Home is what you make of it and your story is the journey of how you get there.

You are an optimistic person so don’t let the beliefs of others around you fool you into altering your own beliefs. Lately, I have been experiencing that others opinions have affected the way I think about things. People may think you are lost because you don’t have an address but you are not. Barons home wasn’t yours because you were treated as an outsider. Now, you are on your way to finding your own home. I have been meaning to tell you how proud I am of you for purchasing the freedom of those close to you. You are helping them find their home in a sense. Cunegonde will also be proud and I am sure she is eagerly awaiting for your arrival.    

 I hope your journey takes you far in life and you find a place that you can call your own. Do not forget, home isn’t a place rather, it is a feeling of belonging.  No matter how lost you are or how far you’ve gone, I will be here.

Sincerely,

Your friend, Sumaiya

PS. Come home, its past your curfew            

Endless Deceit 

You tell me

What you want me

to see; a double shadow

Lurking into my peripheral

of which I call the sea

 

Beautiful roses

fresh memories

Oh how true is it

Question arises of what it is

To be

 

Light shines,

darkness is all

You tell me

 

-Rocky Alam

Script entitled “As Long As I Live”
Candide Chapter 15
Act 15 Scene 3

Characters: Candide and The Jesuit Baron of Thunder-ten- tronckh

[Jesuit hugging Candide]

Jesuit: Candide, my brother, my deliverer. Thank you, I still can’t believe my adorable sister is alive.

[Release from hugging and take a seat at the table]

Jesuit: Perhaps we should enter Buenos Aires together as victors, and rescue my sister Cunégonde. Agreed?

Candide: Sure. That is all I could ever wish for, as I was intending to marry her and hope to do so still.

[Angry Jesuit rise to his feet while shaking his head]

Jesuit: What-What-What an extraordinary piece of insolence! So you would have the effrontery to marry my sister, who has seventy-two quartering on her coats of arms!

[Jesuit sighs]

Jesuit: I consider it highly presumptuous of you to dare speak to me with such rash intention.

[Shock and Confuse Candide also rise to his feet]

Candide: No offense Reverend Father, but all the quartering in the world make no difference; In fact, I was the one who rescues your sister from the arms of a Jew and an Inquisitor; she has certain obligations towards me, and she wishes to marry me.

[Candide slaps his hand on the table]

Candide: As long as I live, I shall marry her.

[Angry Jesuit draws his sword and plunges it up to the hilt in Candide’s belly]

Jesuit: And as long as I live, you shall never.

[As he withdraws his sword]

Jesuit: It is to the best of my world.

[Jesuit exits the room]

To dear in a foreign country.

I do not know you, even your name, but I can find you inside of me.

I know you do not know me, but I know you can understand me.

If you ask me how and why, my answer is I do not know how and why.

But I know you know what I mean, because you can find me inside of you.

Sometimes, I can feel your feeling, and I can read your mind.

These make me happy, because I realize I am not alone in the world.

The only thing I am sad about is that this letter cannot reach you.

Farewell my dear in a foreign country.

From your familiar stranger.

The Wanderers came and went.

Never looking back, never tipping their hat.

Alone they travelled, none have even met.

What could they be looking for, what could they be looking at.

 

Paradis, Paradise, Paraiso

 

It is that timeless concept that evades reality

Never to be seen, never to be experienced in this life or the next

Many fall and rise to find this triviality,

Enticed by Its feeling of wonder, its radiance that all will be for the best.

 

Decadence, Destruction, Decay

 

Others seek to build it at any expense

Erected upon the bones of the those not enlightened

their tower of Babel, made unstable, atop which there can’t be any sense

As any false idol, it will soon collapse to the breath of the blighted.

 

Father, Brother, Sister, Mother our delusion has forsaken us,

Our wills are pure but our methods vile

We soak in a cesspool of our own bile

This vison, our journey can’t be just.

 

Our travels have taken us far and yonder

Our best possible of worlds is one of wonder

Our fantastical and unbelievable creation

Our perfection of pure decoration

 

Misery, Sorrow, Fantasy

 

-Dante Novoa