Poetry.

I am not a poet. In fact, I'm pretty far from it. Words don't flow beautifully and elegantly from my pen. Reading poetry isn't something I consider a favourite pastime either. I consider myself one of those basic poetry readers who love a poem when it has a steady meter and a pretty rhyme scheme even though I know that words don't always flow like that. So, who's my favourite poet? It used to be Robert Frost (not because that was one of the only poets I actually knew but because they were poems I could actually read and interpret).

​Then I discovered Erin Hanson. You may think it's too rehearsed, inauthentic and perhaps even a little fake. But these are the kind of poems I love to read and want to share. I  got a little overenthusiastic and may have shared too many, but I really do love them and I hope you'll take the time to see why.

We are painters without paint,
Mixing the colours in our mind,
Glance upon our palettes
And black ink is all you'll find.
But from its depths we pull
A written sky of brightest blue,
Swirling drops of dreams
Into the things we know as true.
With just the flicker of our wrist
We can make the moonbeams sing,
Spill golden rays of sunrise
Over all of everything.
We can conjure calm or chaos
By just willing it be so,
Pave roads to where your thoughts
Have never realised they could go.
Our pens can pull you on a journey,
On a pilgrimage, a quest,
Drag you through your darkest hours
And then blend them with your best.
So when it ends you stumble backwards
In shock to find it's black and white,
We are painters without paint
And that's the reason why we write.
-e.h

You mustn't live so lightly,
Spin your stories, tell your tales,
Let them dance across the oceans
And set the wind upon your sails.
For every truth found on your travels
And in the pits of your despair,
Is a shout into forever
Of "I existed, and I cared."
​-e.h

Have you ever heard the planet
Hold its breath before a storm?
Like an audience in wait
Before the curtains are withdrawn.
It's the gentle buzz of wild things
Straining leaves toward the sky,
The steady thrum of wings
Taking their owners somewhere dry.
Then for a second it is nothing
But the beat of nature's heart,
Until as though its lungs have burst
The grey sky rips itself apart.
And just like that the earth's alive
As it collectively exhales,
The wind whips through the trees
Whilst they all bend beneath its wails.
Then as the first drop falls
There is a gasp, and then a pause,
Before it seems the whole world breaks
Into a deafening applause.
​-e.h

You have never known a world
In which you weren't the point of view,
For everything that happens
Happens relative to you.
And no matter where you are,
Where you are is your own place,
Nobody else will ever occupy
That point in time and space.
A lifetime is forever
When you look at it like this;
That your consciousness is all
You can be certain that exists.
You see the world has never known
A point of view that's quite the same,
Your own has never been before
And it will never be again.
​-e.h

The city is built on the backbone of wild things,
Beneath it their ancient hearts beat,
Layers on layers of lifetimes
Lying dormant below every street.
And above them the world rumbles onward,
A jungle of windows and walls,
Like ants on the run from a rainstorm
The traffic chaotically crawls.
You can still sense the souls of the wild things,
As the stars are switched on in the night,
Tangled betwixt all the powerlines
And the ghostly glow of streetlights.
It is the feeling of something much grander,
Like the city has simply been borrowed,
And the wild things on which it was built
Will reclaim it in some far tomorrow.
It's the echoes of calls long forgotten.
The reminder we're living above the unknown,
And that we are not the first nor the last ones
Who will call this same piece of land home.
-e.h

All of beauty has a burden;
A price we pay to see the stars,
The weight of knowing where we stand,
Of knowing just how small we are.
For in our tracking turns of time
We feel the ache of getting older,
And the heaviness of the heavens
Pressed upon our brittle shoulders.
We alone query and question,
We alone, despite how small,
And so it goes that unto us
The cost of knowledge rightly falls.
With arms both strong yet shaking
We carry the beauty that life has got,
Amongst the awareness that all that we know
Is nothing compared to the things we do not.
But if this is the price of existence;
That we must stare infinity right in the eye,
Then it's the tiniest price we can pay
For the chance just to look up in awe at the sky.
​-e.h

Don't grow weary with your wonder
For there are sunsets still to see,
Land you must get lost in
And other selves you'll come to be.

Don't grow weary with your wonder
For this is just the opening act,
And if wonder's what you search for
Wonder's what you will attract.

So when weary be your world
And darkness drags the daylight under,
Turn you face up to the star
And don't grow weary with your wonder.
​-e.h

If you catch the train to nowhere
You'll find the strangest man I've met,
Who claimed his ears were always ringing
With the sound of his regret,
Back then time had not yet taught me
Regret was not a sound I knew,
So I thought nothing more than silence
Was left by things you didn't do,
He said he hoped the sound of nothing,
Was the worst I ever heard,
Because regret drives you crazy
As the taste of swallowed words,
"It's a stone thrown in a well," he mused
And this I've not forgotten:
"It's listening all your life
And never hearing it hit the bottom."
​-e.h

Am I the I who thinks the words
Or the I who hears them thought?
The I who sheds the salty tears
Or I who knows I am distraught?
Am I the I who asks the questions
Or the I who understands?
Does the I who thought to ask
Already know which I I am?
​-e.h

Let me tell the tale
Of a girl who didn't stop,
Who climbed up every mountain
Without a pause upon the top.
She'd dance until each blade of grass
Was clothed in drops of dew,
And the sun knew her by name
But the silver moon did too.
For a fear had settled in her bones;
A fear of sitting still,
That if you're not moving forward
It must mean you never will.
So in time her dance got slower
And she looked at all she'd seen,
But found gaps inside the places
That she'd never fully been,
For she was a human doing
Human moving, human seeing,
But she'd never taken time
To simply be a human being.
​-e.h