Having Lost My Words Poem by gina prettybrowneyes

Today
I doubt what I once knew:
“every minute of every hour, in my dreams and in my ‘wakes-
words like dancing deer through the grasses and
shooting stars in the night, run through my head.”
Now what run through my head are calculus formulas and music notes.

I remember the long-forgotten verses I penned in my stickered journal:
“words sustain my soul, like food and water sustain my body.
they leap from my pen to the page like
God’s miracle to man.”
But the words don’t seem to leap so freely like before,
They slosh and gurgle in the mudslides of my mind.

At thirteen I proclaimed:
“I write to feel, to cry out, to teach. to be.
there is a rhyme, a rhythm, a song in my heart”
But is there a song in my heart?
Did I imagine it on a childhood whim
Or did it just fade like the pinstripes on my favorite
Pair of underwear?

I have no answers, no words, no confidence anymore
I only hope that I am a poet
And that a rhyme, a rhythm, a song
Still rest in my heart

***quoted lines taken from a poem I wrote in middle school titled “I Am.”