Holy moley – I just found something that I thought was once lost long, long ago: my collection of poetry and prose written from 1995 to 2000. I used to have a printed copy that was accidentally thrown out when someone was helping me clean my room ages and ages ago, and I thought thereby I had lost my only copy.
Little did I know that somewhere along the line I made an electronic copy of my old works, and have kept them safe for the past 18 years, even as I changed computers and workstations time and time again. Unfortunately not all of my work was saved, but a very large majority, and wow are the poems bad (hey, I was writing some of these at 14 years old), but it genuinely warms my heart to have found this old collection that I had for so long thought lost.
Here’s a snippet, a short poem I wrote in September of 1998, one of many untitled works from the collection:
Wings of doves, talons of crows.
Which is which, nobody knows.One is deadly, the other soft.
Both will hold you high aloft.One will drop you, one will protect.
Which one, will you elect?Which is which, though, nobody knows.
Wings of doves, talons of crows.
As cringe-worthy as many of my old works are, I think it’ll be an interesting exercise to go through them with fresh eyes and see if there are any gems in the rough – or at the very least to compare and contrast my poetry of years past and the short stories I post now.
