By: Margery Hannah

​

I attended a SOAR virtual workshop this past Sunday, Love in the Afternoon Loving up on You!, where Kimberly A. Collins used her Writing Training Wheels™ as a tool for teaching healing and empowerment through writing poetry.

A good majority of attendees were Howard University students, and the intergenerational exchange of ideas was refreshing. While I’ve written many a poem, for the first time I read a poem of mine (written in real time at the workshop) for an audience. Love in courage, I share my piece: 

 

I restore the spirit of me under the apricot sun.

One can only smell fresh baked bread so long.

I’ve got to go outside.

Buy blueberry cotton candy, let my teeth ache a moment.

Find joy in the future, in babies’ laughter, their tight curls

a helix of life’s zig zags, a marvel of physics ever resting and protecting—

a chipped scale balancing the self-less and self-full.