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Trust in God; She will provide. -- Emmeline Pankhurst

Dear God,

I wish you were a woman

Because since I was a girl

I’ve pictured you as a white man

With white hair

Dressed in a long white robe.

And I am not a man

And my skin is a shade of deep chocolate brown.

So how can I believe that I was created in your image?

That's me with on the left, the one with the awesome yellow socks, with my sweet cousin Kandis.

Let's make today a Writeous Wednesday, shall we?

Here's a writing prompt:

Read the poem "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon

Then, write a poem of your own reflecting on your childhood, family or both.

Here's mine:

I wake
And I want to wrap my wounds with words
And rest
And heal.

But I must return to the battlefield
To fight
To kill.

Photo by Katherine Webb

I have a confession: I am jealous of poet and educator Ashley M. Jones.

I don’t envy Jones because last year, at the ripe old age of 25, she was one of only six winners of the 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a prestigious award given annually to support emerging women writers with exceptional talent. I don’t envy her because she landed a dream creative writing teaching job at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) as soon as she finished her graduate work at Florida International University. I’m not jealous of Jones’s book deal (her first full-length poetry collection will hit bookshelves in November) and I don’t envy her because last yearB-Metro gave Jones their Fusion Award, an honor given to Birmingham residents who champion diversity, inclusion, and acceptance.

I am jealous of Jones because she is in love—with poetry.

Sure, I, too, as a writer and an English instructor at ASFA, have great affection for the written word, but compared to Jones’s passion for poetry, the relationship I have with writing is mere puppy love. Jones’s love for poetry is evident not only in her written work, but in every conversation you have with her, in every lecture she gives to her students at ASFA, and even in every post she makes to her social media channels. On any given day you’ll find her on Facebook gushing over a new book of poetry she just bought or old work she has just rediscovered. On Instagram you can see her as giddy as a schoolgirl with a crush on the boy next door as she posts pictures of her preparation for her latest lesson. And during football season, when her fellow Alabamians are posting chants of “Roll Tide” and “War Eagle,” Jones simply declares, “Go poetry!”

“Whenever I post on Facebook about poems that I like, it’s usually because I’ve read the poem and caught the Holy Ghost from the poem,” Jones says, laughing and raising her hands in the air in praise of poetry.  “The way that people use words and even the way their message is conveyed [through poetry] just seems more immediate, sometimes more sassy, sometimes more painful. It’s just juicier. And so that’s what I love about reading it and writing it.”

Read the entire article at B-Metro.com

Image by Steve Hankins, via Flickr/Creative Commons

I am not a poet.

I used to be. But verse and I parted ways long ago. We broke up in a bar, ironically, in the middle of a spoken word open mic night.

Sitting there in my chair at a tavern named Rudyard Kipling I decided to dump poetry.

This was not a bad breakup. We both knew it was for the best. My heart was elsewhere.

I wanted to be a columnist. I wanted to write opinion pieces and reported essays that would change people's minds and even their lives.

For awhile I had the chance to boast the title I coveted and I wrote a bi-weekly column for the newspaper I worked for in Louisville, Ky.

Then I quit my job.

I quit my job to teach literature. And though in this new job I spent my days and nights devouring  words, the writer in me was still hungry. At one point I thought I had starved her to death.

One day I stopped feeling like a writer.

Through all this I had a friend to turn to -- blogging. We became pals in 2008. Our friendship was easy and fun. And as we got closer, blogging began to help me find my feminist self.

Our relationship grew more serious; my passion for blogging grew more intense. We became more than friends. Blogging became much more than a hobby.

Like a new lover who gives you the courage to open your heart again, blogging gave me the courage to once again call myself a writer and reminded me what being a writer really means.

I was back to carrying around a notebook of ideas as I did when I called myself a poet. I was back to writing for writing's sake, and not simply for an audience or for money. I was back to writing simply because I couldn't help myself.

And together blogging and I birthed something beautiful -- See Jane Write.

Blogging is the love of my (writing) life.

And this is why I blog.

April is National Poetry Month and Birmingham-based poet and blogger Gabriel Gadfly has invited his readers to create and submit video on why poetry matters to them. Gabriel has been posting this videos on his blog all month. I just had to join in on the fun and figured I'd post the video here too.

So here is why poetry matters to me...

In the second Sex and the City movie, Carrie Bradshaw (who, in case you haven’t been keeping up, is now married) runs into her old flame Aidan while she’s in Abu Dhabi with the girls. Against better judgment, and the advice of her friends, Carrie decides to get all dolled up and met Aidan for a late night dinner and at the end of the night they kiss.  

Carrie admits she went out and lip-locked with Aidan because she hadn’t felt like herself lately. She was losing her sense of self. Two weeks ago I was tempted to run to the arms of an old love for the same reason.  Sort of.

While vacationing in Louisville, Ky., (yeah, not quite Abu Dhabi) I thought about returning to my first love – poetry.

I used to be a poet.

For years I lived my life in verse, my speech sprinkled with alliteration.

I read poetry every day and never went to bed without putting down on paper at least one line.

In my purse I carried a notebook filled with phrases that would eventually become stanzas that would eventually become poems that I hoped would eventually become a chapbook.

My passion for poetry began at an early age. I was in elementary school and my best friend was moving away. We had a fight just before he left. I wrote him a poem to apologize. And then I kept writing and writing and writing. Later I was introduced to Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni and I kept reading and reading and reading.

In college I minored in creative writing and saw my poems in print for the first time in my university’s literary journal. In graduate school I wrote, taught, and performed poetry through June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program. In Louisville, Ky., I was a featured act at a spoken word event for the first time and was asked to perform at poetry festivals. I was even paid for my poetry for the first time.

Then one day I stopped being a poet.

I remember when my passion for poetry started to wan. I got a column at the newspaper where I worked at the time and through that I felt like I was reaching people and connecting with people like never before and in a way I never could with poetry. And one day, quite ironically while I was at a spoken word night, I made a conscious decision to quit poetry and focus on non-fiction. And I never looked back, until two weeks ago.

Like Carrie, I haven’t felt like myself lately. I don’t feel like a writer. I’m a teacher now, not a reporter. Writing is no longer my full time job. It’s something I have to squeeze into my free time and, therefore, feels like a hobby instead of my art. I blog often and freelance when I can, but still when I utter the words, “I’m a writer,” it feels like a lie.

Two weeks ago I started wondering if poetry could help me get my groove back. After all, it was my first love. I came up with this idea to write poem a day in April, which is National Poetry Month. Then I remembered Carrie and Aidan in Abu Dhabi and I realized this project would be the equivalent of making out with poetry for a month.

Yes, poetry was my first love, but we don’t all marry our high school sweethearts.

But the relationships of our younger years are important because they teach us how to love. Poetry taught me how to be a real writer. Poetry taught me to write for writing’s sake. Everything around me was a poem waiting to be drafted. I didn’t write poetry to win adoring audiences or to make money. I wrote poetry because I just couldn’t help myself.

To feel like a writer, to feel like myself again, I must get back to that. I must write blog posts with no thought of page views and pen reported and personal essays with little regard for freelance gigs.  I must write simply because I must write. And doing this will be the best way to honor poetry this month.