A STRENGTH TO BEHOLD

Live the life you
have to your greatest potential—
grab heaping fills!

Anatomies, metabolics
no longer everlasting—
those people, faces quieted,
never to be seen again/
can’t be replaced!

To grow & leave naïve behind—
a morsel of peace
is hard to find.
Hold on to it with your grace
& your dignity!

Everyone is somebody else
for a reason—
you’ve got the good,
but evil seems to be in season!

Locations change, lives rearrange—
fully stressed, fully tested,
young die young. Older saddened
by the “gray” infested.
What’s yours is no longer
& the will to take stronger!
It is the way of life today—
some care/others don’t, & in that
you’ve got to watch how you move
& be careful how you groove.

You may put your head down
& in your heart feel the frown.

But stay who you are.
Let nothing & no one
steal your thunder
& let nothing & no one
put you under!

AND, as always,
hold your head
up high!

Higher, if you can!

Spyhrit

“I’ve been writing since I was in elementary school. I used to write in a diary. I was a busy mind at a young age. A lot of things would float around in my head and I didn’t have a place to express myself. So I thought, since I was into the arts, that writing could be a healthful resource as well.

“I grew up in the projects—in all the areas that were difficult. I was born in Harlem and raised in Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant, so I experienced all of that. Being an older child, I kept a lot locked up inside, unexpressed.

“Writing gives me a place of solace and peacefulness. When you write, you’re releasing. You’re getting out all that pent-up energy and thoughts that perhaps you can’t share with anyone. But you can share it with the paper, with yourself. Poetry takes you to a place where you can find something. You might feel lost along the way, but once you’ve found the words, you’ve found a path. There are days when I literally feel there is no one I can talk to and I wonder what to do. Writing helps! The words just come to me as an intervention. And writing the words down, tears will be in my eyes, but still I get the words out.

“Coming to ASC’s Creative Writing Workshop and having people to collaborate with and to share your experiences is exhilarating. So many things happen through the poems because they come from the heart. The power of words is an amazing thing—to me, it’s a phenomenon, a gift.”

—Spyhrit

Spyhrit has participated in ASC’s Creative Writing Workshop since 2005 and is a graduate of ASC’s Peer Recovery Education Program (PREP). Her poems appear in Situations 9.