A Sample of My Poetry Portfolio
Queen Ann’s Lace
Sarah Ward
Green cylinder-tube, thick with
cells and hollow
waterways,
Engorged at
the apex of an
explosion, branching
Outwards into falling
sticks laden with
snowflakes dipped in
sugar,
Drops of blossoms in
circular swirls of fragrance
Exploding
outward from
the center
Suspended by the
verte wires of life giving
hoses
Until the end of the burst,
the finale of forever
Poised for destruction
On the flat canvas
of the meadow
Of lead, unmoving as the mountains
Cutting Class
Sarah Ward
Stop it.
Just stop it right there.
Do you see the way my shoulders tense
For the impending blow?
I know what you are about to say,
Before your brain even says “go.”
It’s always the same:
“Cutting is so emo”
“Cutting is so overdone”
“It seems like everyone’s cutting”
“It’s just a fad.”
Please sit back and allow me to teach you,
My friend,
About a piece of subculture you have miss-read
Before you go and say something that
Will come back and bite your sorry ass.
Lesson One:
The world you think you know,
The one you watch on TV,
Of teenagers cutting to “express themselves”
Like some type of avant-garde new-wave art
Is a sham of mass proportions, see;
Birthed by a society
Unwilling to face the truth.
The next Lesson, and one
You should remember well-
There are two types of
Cutters in the world, my friend:
The ones who show off their scars and proudly proclaim
“How misunderstood” they are,
And those who walk and talk among you
Everyday, and hide their sins.
One type is all for the attention,
The strange looks and whispered fears
Evoked by the presence of something unfamiliar,
Or the flash of disgust that flits
On the faces of your peers;
Anything to seem so jaded you “could care less.”
I despise these people,
These watered-down wannabe’s.
The other type is all about the sickness,
The need to feel in control,
Feel something,
Anything at all-
Besides the pain that won’t go away.
Allow me to elaborate,
A sort of Lesson 2.5;
This thing sits in your chest,
Like a
Hundred
Pound
Weight
Slowly crushing you and ripping you apart
All at once.
You want to cry, but no tears will come
You want to yell, but you can’t muster the strength to care
And it freaks you out in a non-assuming way,
Because you know it’s not ok, it’s not all right
But if you let it show you’ll be like everyone else-
Labled “emo,”
One of the crowd,
Another sick kid with
“Too much time on their hands.”
This is why I usually sit, and
Quietly seethe
Whenever someone like you opens
Their big, fat mouth
To talk about something you have no right to touch.
But no more, my friend-
Not now.
As a final Lesson in parting,
Just remember that as I wait,
Caught in the conundrum,
Wrestling with the urge
To set the record straight
And be branded for what I was
Or let the lie go on and on,
Sitting in class as you spew your filth,
Pretending to watch the second hand on the clock tick by-
Just remember this:
I am always out there,
Always waiting.
A formless entity,
Filled with the malice of ages
Ready to, like some ancient demon
Possess your loved ones
At the drop of a razor blade.
And while the ignorance you profess
May protect you from me for now,
Rest assured, my friend-
One day you WILL turn around,
Maybe tomorrow or twenty years from today,
And find yourself surrounded
By the very thing
You brushed aside.
You will find bleach pens
And bloody-brown gauze
Strewn on the vanity,
Creating a nest for half-used tubes of Neosporin
Bought in secret for marks that
Scab and discolor and attempt to fade, each a
Measuring line of lies
and stains
and broken trust,
As you realize that you,
My friend,
Were the most vulnerable
Of all of us.
Soul Biology
Sarah Ward
Everything today is all about the shell
As opposed to the filling;
With Science in vogue and genetics all the rage,
It’s no wonder how important it is
That my flesh is up-to-date.
Before I was even born,
Every chromosome was tested for a hint
Of genetic malfunction. The price you pay
For older parents, I suppose;
But everything checked out,
And like a Nascar vehicle
I was given the green light.
“Go ahead and give life to this one,
She seems to be Ok”
What Gods on earth, these doctors and their tests.
I don’t have Downs Syndrome or
Huntington’s,
No obvious deformities of any kind,
A healthy female fetus,
Who, Mendel’s squares proclaimed
Carried a recessive blue-eye gene
Burn-under-a-candle pale white skin,
Blonde hair
And hopefully all her toenails.
I would be haunted by
Poor health,
Bad eyesight,
Asthma and high blood pressure,
History of stroke and cancer.
But medication can take care
Of all of that now a days.
If times had been different,
They might have found or cared
That my Uncle was bipolar,
And my mother carried the tainted genes
Which would, one day, awake in me
If not manifesting as pure manic-depressive,
Not pure depression and anxiety, either.
There’s nothing worse than limbo,
Not quite one but worse than the other.
Changing meds every once in awhile
Making the future and the question of progeny
More serious than I care to examine.
What isn’t inherited these days?
But what I need, and want, and yearn for
Is some positive news,
A soul biology,
Telling me of not what I will become,
But what I can become, or what acts
And tales of greatness and sorrow
Make up the un-genetic me.
Could my genome tell you I like fantasy novels
And watching trashy reality TV?
Could it tell you I have been to Europe
And once I was in love?
That I held a sloth in Columbia when I was 12,
Or that I cried at a poem I no longer remember
Read at my Grandmother’s funeral?
I wonder if one chromosome can illuminate
Why I sleep with two fans on in the winter,
Lying in bed huddled beneath my comforter?
And why for all of God’s green earth
Math escapes my capacity as elusively as the Jabberwocky?
Maybe it can tell about my past more than my present-
About my mother,
Who left her husband and love of teaching French
To go back to school for her MBA?
Or how she met my nerdy father,
A lawyer with a masters in philosophy from Tulane?
How my parents were married,
And designed me and my brother
My mom repeating “I Love You” to us, because she wanted
Those to be our first words.
Or could they tell how my mother’s mother rode a horse to
school,
And my father’s father went out-house tipping one Halloween,
Only to discover while running away that one was occupied?
And great-great-aunt Agnes, a week before her hundredth
birthday,
Slammed her window down on an unsuspecting burglar
Back in Kansas?
Such strength and character those scientist-gods
Never saw. The tears and laughs,
The past and future
Please, for once, divine
My place in the world,
Not science’s place
In my body.
10-9-07
Sarah Ward
Somewhere out there is my soul.
It likes to fly away from me, an Indian spirit,
And dance among the winds of time,
Even space; flitting through the cosmos like some airborne cottonwood seed
Not unlike the seeds once found in my backyard.
It goes into the world and looks around a bit,
Then comes and visits me in the night
Telling stories of what it has seen.
As a child, I would go with my soul
On midnight adventures and masquerades
Of the macabre and salvation,
Learning and digesting, understanding as only a child can.
Through eyes untainted my soul and I could see for miles
Into the future and distant past
Such great companions were never seen before
As we scaled the mountains of upholstered furniture in the family room
And hid under the translucent table in the parlor;
Watching squirrels attempt to glean their dinner
from the bird feeders off the porch,
Laughing a child’s cruel laugh as they fell.
One day, however, we split;
My soul and I could not coexist.
I fell from grace,
Into a world of sterile white and
Living steel where capsules of chemicals
Are gods among the men who created them,
And my soul lifted off
Back to the living, breathing places
Where synthetic life is not allowed.
When it returned I was numb;
It radiated warmth and
The sea breeze, embracing me,
No longer young but jaded and bitter
No longer innocent but tainted.
And for a short time I was complete;
But my soul wandered off again-
Not without the promise of return-
In search of something worth existing for,
Leaving me wretched for a time,
Unable to speak.
So every night we commune,
My soul and I,
And every night we wish it could be different.
But like two lovers who detest each other,
We are bound but cannot live together.
10-3-07
Sarah Ward
Today, a leaf fell into my cleavage.
I looked down at it, nestled between my breasts, and
It looked up at me; a yellow lecher,
Pleased with its lot.
I laughed, and left it there-
I think it made Him jealous.
In Which A College Student Attempts to Write A Poem About Apathy, Discovering the True Meaning of the Word
Sarah Ward
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