Lost Meadows (Record of Life Poetry Collection Book 19)

What is belonging? It is a question asked and seldom answered. To be an outsider or an insider, to feel at once a misfit and the one invited to join the circle, the speaker describes a life of solitude that has opened to the blinding burn of community. Where visibility can equally be a blessing and a curse, to be unable to fit or bend is a deficiency; one feels like a disruptor and a symbol through the projection of existence, and overwhelm becomes the norm. Lost Meadows is a burial ground for the naivety of girlhood, a place of rest for the past selves that came before, and an acknowledgment that when love is offered and not taken, another door opens and is not the end.An ever-interchanging sequence of hiding and self-acceptance, the collection offers commentary on the unfairness of life, the role of power, and the recognition of trauma, wounds, and the painful growth that comes with shedding a self. Divided into three parts: Literature is My Soul, The Burn of Visibility, and In Hindsight, the poetic work circles the experience of transcension, difference, and the mourned loss of innocence in an elegiac, gentle mastery that guides one through the quiet, constricted agony of a fragile self-evolution. The confrontation between the projection of who the speaker once dreamed to be and the truth of who they are collides in part one, Literature is My Soul. A silent compression of inevitability, the speaker succumbs to the acceptance of what cannot be changed, and to the understanding of a deviation from normality and the sharp recognition of the expectations and the price of achievement. One who stands out cannot stand in.Belonging is traded for awareness in the second part, The Burn of Visibility, with the assessment of eternal social opportunism, optics, benign tracking, and the honed-in gaze of many eyes that forces the individual into a burning, claustrophobic spotlight they did not sign up for. In Hindsight, the final part is a crossroads and a goodbye to a silent affinity paralyzed by fear and indecision, and finally a choice that backslides into a retroactive letting go. Intellectualizing an underlying feeling of inadequacy opens the door to growth and the quiet chance at new connections as the world moves on. A lesson of hope and realism, the book closes with the contemplation on what truly makes us whole and that the path to healing lies in truth, sometimes even if it means turning from some roads forever. Read more