Fall poetry collection

Loveless

By Ciara Derenzo 

We are often told to look at love as something reserved for another person,

For soft kisses on summer days and the feel of someone's shoulder as you lay your head against it.

We picture it like the movies and the books, with red roses and boxes of chocolates.

With suits and dresses and dinner dates.

But love often looks different.

Love is remembering old imaginary friends and feeling like a small part of you has reunited with someone lost,

Love is the smile on my sister's face as I read her a bedtime story and the princess falls in love with the knight for the millionth time.

Love is the embrace of a best friend after a weekend apart,

Or a sleepover spent rehashing old memories while staring at old polaroid photos as our cheeks start to ache from constant laughter.

Love is also what it feels like to hold a childhood comfort object like my ragged stuffed giraffe with different colored stitches barely keeping it together after all these years

And the pictures and notes in a worn down keepsake box with rustic pink butterfly design, holding relics from old and new friends alike.

Love is reading through my favorite lines from a long beloved book taken off my tall, dark wood bookshelf just to be transported into my favorite fantasy realms,

Love is when the last page has a true love's kiss,

Or a happy ending of any kind.

Or maybe love is the way my hand feels guiding across a sketchbook,

catching a moment in time through slow brush strokes that slowly color the canvas of choice in just the right way to create a story immortalized through paper.

Maybe it is the slow build of affection I developed for storytelling and the vivid worlds and realities that take shape in my mind.

Or the projected sound of my singing in a kids production of the Addams family, and the smile on all of the school childrens faces as we received flowers after our first show.

Love is passion and pain, victory and loss all at the same time.

It doesn't conform into the boxes we give it, it doesn't follow rules like we do.

Love is all around us, inside of us, and we try so hard to cage it in a box, to say that love is only one thing, one way, that it is only reserved for romance and diamond rings.

But love is free, untamable and wild, a lion running in the jungle.

Like anarchy, it breaks free of constraints,

And no matter how we try to deny ourselves, we are all so full of love, of passion, and fire, of joy and heartbreak.

And even though it feels wrong to let myself write this poem,

To let the inspiration take hold of me and write about love and beauty, when we've all experienced so much hate and darkness that seems to drudge on forever,

It is also true that when hate exists love must also as well

Like two sides of a coin,

Opposites, but still intertwined.

Sometimes we have to let love guide us to see the cracks in the wood boarded over the window and look at the sun, or the stars,

To see the light peeking through the vast darkness, lest we get lost in the night.

We all need to let ourselves instead get lost in what, who, how, we love, instead of hate

And we must search hard and long for the joy in what seems like a joyless life,

For the hope in the never ending fear

And for love, in everything that seems loveless

A Small Flower

By Sophia Connell

A small flower blooms

In dark and dusty ground

She breathes in fresh air

And quietly looks ‘round

Her heart beats afresh

A moment in the sun

She welcomes something new

Something that’s just begun

But hope can come and go

She tries to blink back tears

Her petals start to wilt

As she looks back on years

She tries and she stands tall

She holds herself up strong

She loves this gentle plot

Though she’s known it not too long

But this small flower blooms

Despite her cautious heart 

She loves to reach for light

And loves this fresh, new start

Both of these poems were written by a member of our own Niskayuna Creative Writing club. If you would like to write your own or participate in national novel writing month, join us in room D107 on Monday mornings at 8:05! New members are always welcome.