Elaina, a RISE Healthy Housing and Support Services Supported Housing resident, shares this dynamic and powerful poem, Immersed in Thought. Writing and creating poetry is a great way for many people to self-affirm their personal power and creativity. Thank you Elaina for sharing your poems with us.
Memories flood back as I sit alone in the dark.
Sunny day, intricately woven like a fine lace.
I ponder them, a smile ignites, as if from a spark,
Then reality crashes in, destroying my happy place.There I am again, in this nightmare I call life,
Nearly drowning in sorrow yet, anger keeps me alive.
Leather clad, strong as steel, like my favorite sheathed knife.The sweat pours from my brow, as I force composure.
My blood thunders through my veins, as if trying to escape.
I know I can’t give up but, how much more must I endure?
Ture strength is not in numbers, it is showing no fear.Were I to bend, heaven forbid, to actually break,
What kind of carnage would that cause?
While it’s true, I have made many mistakes,
I still return, sometimes bloody, beaten and raw.People can be cruel, the world, vicious.
Yet, the strongest of us soldier on.
We battle for the win because it’s so delicious
We feel the need to tell others we have won.For myself, I have lived another day,
Sometimes, a nearly fruitless endeavor.
Yet still I choose to fight and stay.
Rather than be gone forever.
Elaina has been writing poetry since she was 14. She took advanced literature classes in high school where she learned how to write poems.
Some of her poems were published in a local paper in Vermont where she grew up. In 2013, some of her poems were published in an anthology called Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write.
The love of writing poetry has stayed with Elaina throughout her life and she has used it as a coping skill for many years.