Week 27: Tented Poetry

You invite me to share
with you the intense words of my poetry
in the tent we’ve made to
find ourselves closer to nature.
Halfway-outdoors,
we trade poems like secrets,
seeking, searching to be a part of
something greater.

But the thin layer
of the tent’s bottom between
the ground and you and me
serves as a reminder--
we are not a part of this,
we are never going to
belong here.

For we are not made of beauty.
Not made of the stuff of the earth,
just caught accidentally in its orbit,
we're too complex to ever really
fit in.

But here, with you,
I’m starting to see that poetry
can capture that simplicity.
In words I find the beauty
I can’t find in myself,
a realization that has yet to
make me sad.

Though the tent’s top zipper cloaks us
from seeing the stars,
it falls free with a quick pull.
And so we share the poems we’ve strung together
as the layers, the thin layers,
fall away.

Our existence will never be simple but
tonight, that is enough,
for beneath these blinking stars
I am made of words, and
I have never felt more alive, I have
never been more beautiful.