Poetry is and will always be my first love.
My poems come from my dreams, imagination and emotions. They appear in my mind unexpectedly. An idea comes in a phrase or an image that keeps repeating itself. Something will pester me to the point I cannot ignore. I write it down and it leaves my mind and becomes something else.
My process of putting a poem together is rather basic. I bash things together to make them fit, hammering together the letters and sounds.
I discard most of my work through editing. Then my poems are left to ferment and bubble over many years. Those that survive the process and the passing of time usually turns out to become something worthwhile.
I am working on a small collection of Sicilian inspired poems and artworks in the form of a self published zine, which will be out soon. I want to share these poems because they represent an intimate connection to the island, through my maternal grandparents. They are the fruits of two decades of experience living on an ancient Mediterranean island.
Today as I am still editing my next post in the Sicilian Descent series I thought I’d share one of the poems and artworks in a special preview.
Please let me know what you think.
I’ll post right here as soon as I’ve published and will keep you informed when everything is available.
Thanks for your support and have a great week.
Sicilian DNA
I live in Sicily because I fell in love with a Sicilian,
but in reality, the love affair existed long before …
I’ve been enamoured since birth,
Italy is imprinted, entangled in my ancestry,
my family and heritage has always been here
connected to this place of endless human history
my love of stories keeps me happily lost inside its tale
there is always a story, a connection, a heartbeat
in my Sicilian DNA,
held together by a knot too tight to be undone.
“My poems come from my dreams, imagination and emotions” – I so relate…and from walking, from what I notice around me…and too, to your collage work, one of my favourite forms of creative expression.
I have followed you for several years and love what you are now up to. I had a similar response to being in the Black Forest of Germany a decade ago – coincidentally the same time I visited your beloved island – a sudden heartfelt knowing how happy I was to be in my father’s land. The dna runs deep.
Thank you so much Katharine. It’s wonderful to hear from you, thank you for reading along😊 There has been something about the pandemic which has made me tap back into old creative habits.
I’ve always found it fascinating to feel visseral connections to places, it seems like our DNA remembers.❤