ARTIST STATEMENT

When was the last time you focused on your breathing? Watched the tree outside your window sway with the wind?

2023 seemed to fly by fast with everyone scrambling to recover from the pandemic. Understandably so, I feel as though I had nothing on my mind but work, work, work, work, and more work—spreadsheets and reports, back-end setups and integrations.

I wrote this poem one early morning when I was afforded the luxury to pause and watch the sunrise through the capiz windows of my partner’s family home.

I hope this piece inspires the reader to take a moment. A moment to be gentler to yourself—you have worked hard and you deserve to spend time and energy on anything that will bring you peace.

Watch the sunrise. Appreciate your lunch before you eat. Enjoy that glass of crispy iced cold water. Stretch.

I urge you to not be afraid to enjoy these small mercies.

PRAISE

I love the use of negative simile. Often, when we can’t quite put our finger on what a thing is, we can work backward by confirming what it is not. It is a perfect poem for a one-minute sudden death round: nice and succinct, yet packing the poetic punch we all like to get hit by.

—Lyrical Lunacy

“Gently,” responds to The Sudden Death prompt by Lyrical Lunacy.

Gently,

not like the sun
greeting your skin
at the break of dawn,
nor with the breath of wind
brushing past your cheeks
on a late night.

Not like the unbridled
devotion to a newborn,
nor the ghost of fingertips
combing through
a sleeping head.

Gently, gently,
like light against capiz¹;
a ripple seen from the ocean floor.

A whisper of movement,
a moment in the cosmos.

———
¹capiz: capiz shell / an oyster with a translucent shell; used as glass substitute