AN APOLOGY

I am sorry

Sometimes,

I forget.

 

I forget the color

The color of love

 

Sorry,

Sometimes I see blurry

I am in a dream

I see colors

Still blurry

 

I wake up

It was a dream

And I realize

I need you, my love

To see it all Clearly.

                                  _Farzana A.

 

THE DREAM

Once I was a Diamond

The Precious & The Beautiful

I was the one that you kept close to your heart.

 

Once you cherished me.

But, I wasn’t the diamond you chased

So you left.

You left for the Brighter, the Shinier.

 

My heart aches.

I thought I was your diamond.

But, then you left me.

 

Now, I’m nothing,

Nothing but a piece of dusty stone.

 

You dreamt,

Brighter-shinier

Brighter-shinier

 

And you lost

Every piece of brightness I gave you.

 

Then It was dark

You were lost in your dream

 

Then,

You woke up

And it all made sense

But I was gone.

 

And you realized

It was just a Dream.

 

                                       Farzana A.

Theme: Human Desire

Is happiness enough to satisfy
Or is there something that we crave more
The feeling of temptation is intensified
The more that we are ignored

Humans tend to want what they cannot have
Instead of being grateful for God’s plan
We allow greed to split us into halves
Because we believe another human can make us glad

But happiness can only come from within
And no person or money will allow that
You must search deep within yourself and skin
To see that this artificial joy is an act

A self-defense mechanism to justify
You must right your wrongs in order to rectify

• Julienne Guzman

Theme/Topic: Restrictions on women and their identity

• A woman is considered to only be a mother, daughter, sister, wife, or any other second category females.

 

• I saw a woman on the train wear a bakerboy cap which is traditionally a masculine thing to wear but she pulled it off really nicely.

 

• This morning I was running late for class and didn’t have time to make breakfast and my mom was sick but I didn’t ask my dad because that’s my mom’s “job.”

 

• In our culture, women are referred to by their husband’s last name—stripped from their own.  

 

• All we ever want is to be noticed, heard, understood, and appreciated.

– Sheik Floradewan

I cry myself to sleep, knowing I’m only a woman,

I try to write how I feel, knowing I shouldn’t

 

I have been described as a witch,

I have been called the devil

As if I am not human, as if man and I,

are not on the same level

 

I am alone,

from dusk till dawn

The more I hide,

How long can I go on?

 

In the light of a different day, I see myself write to you,

 

To should from shouldn’t,

I write to you now–as a New Woman

 

F.B (This is temporary, I might change it)

Poem in the point of view of Anywhere Out Of The World:

 

Once again I find myself alone

Talking to the only one I know

My soul.

Oh soul, why can’t we be happy in this little house of ours?

Why do we always long for more?

Enough is enough!

I must move on.

My soul wants more,

But I want none.

With this life

I am done.

-RJL

Dec. 7: Farzana, Anum, Sheik, Daliza, Yeshi, Fatimah, Eloise, Rocky, Brandon, Oscar, Andrew, Ruth, Annie

Dec. 12: Sam, George, Dante, Sumaiya, Julie, Shoshanna, Nudrat, Kody, Haein, Sabrina, Emily, Jiaming, Robin

*These are the days on which you present, not necessarily the order in which you will present.

Dear all, I have posted creative writing prompts and presentation guidelines under the Essay Assignments tab. I have also pushed the deadline for the creative piece for the anthology. You must now post that piece of writing to the blog before class on Dec 12.

In the Notebook of a Return to Native Land, I had difficulty grasping the understanding of the text several times that I have to re-read the page over and over to fully understand what the text meant. In the text “they would sell us on the town square and an ell of English cloth and salted meat from Ireland cost less than we did, and this land was calm, tranquil, repeating that the spirit of the lord was in its acts”, I started to understand the meaning after reading it over a couple times.

I did not what understand what they meant in the last couple of sentence meant so I searched for the definitions. In this land with “promising tender cane and silky cotton”, seemed like a good place until it says “brand us with red-hot irons”. As I read to the last sentence, I didn’t understand what the repeating of the spirit of the lord because if it was repeating, then shouldn’t the “lord” be something or someone thats doing good, instead of bad? The fact that it was repeating over again I didn’t understand what this spirit is. Throughout this book, I had to search up definitions on what I didn’t understand and put the words together.

“And be the tree of our hands!

it turns, for all, the wounds cut

in its trunk

the soil works for all

and towards the branches a headiness of fragrant precipitation!”

pg. 38

 

I had difficulty in reading this passage. Perhaps it was because of the personification of the tree having hands. I tried to keep this idea in mind while reading the remaining lines but fell even more confused when it talked about having wounds cut. I understand a human can have wounds but where does a tree have “wounds cut”? I dealt with this difficulty by just taking each line one at a time instead of trying to see the entire picture at once. By understanding the meaning of the individual lines and any significance it may have, I was able to see a bigger picture. I also needed to look up the word “headiness” because I wasn’t sure of what it meant. After realizing it means being intoxicating or rich, it made sense that the next few words described the fragrance.