{"id":184,"date":"2010-06-13T19:03:37","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T23:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/?p=184"},"modified":"2010-06-13T19:08:49","modified_gmt":"2010-06-13T23:08:49","slug":"what-love-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/?p=184","title":{"rendered":"What Love Isn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here I go again, sharing a first draft of a poem, letting it go before the fear of releasing it can claim it to a drawer, a computer file, or a wastebasket.\u00a0 And here I go again, writing in the abstract, not being specific about what the poem is about.\u00a0 I am leaving the \u201ctriggering subject\u201d out of the poem because the details aren\u2019t as important as the understanding.\u00a0 Does it matter that I may not have crafted a \u201cgood\u201d poem?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 What matters is the heart of the poem, the heart of thought, of thinking through experience to know how I feel and what I understand or what I\u2019m trying to understand that may actually go beyond understanding.\u00a0 The poem not as objective witness to an event or a conversation, but the poem as heartfelt and honest as it can be in its subjectivity.\u00a0 Lately I seem to be writing without apples and oranges and flowers and feisty verbs and pretty adjectives.\u00a0 It\u2019s a phase I\u2019m going through, I guess, like growing old.\u00a0 I challenge you to let go of whatever you have learned about writing and just write, just once with no critic looking over shoulder whether that critic be you or someone else.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

As always,<\/strong><\/p>\n


\nSherry<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

What Love Isn\u2019t<\/span><\/h2>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometimes I wonder if the good guys are any better than the bad guys I mean the good guys who a woman thinks are good but surprise you just when you\u2019re feeling comfortable, feeling safe, feeling loved and you think you know they won\u2019t hurt you, they, the ones you think are gentle and kind and generous okay maybe not generous but the ones you trust with all your heart to know that you a woman hurts or have been hurt and you trust that they know that the history of\u00a0 violation against women doesn\u2019t go away but often gets hidden and if you\u2019re a lucky woman the violence gets sheltered by the goodness of men and women who understand violence is not okay yet even the slip of someone\u2019s tongue sends you spinning into anger into fear into running far far away from even the possibility that someone\u2019s fear or rage or defense, even if it\u2019s not against you, can hurt you or anyone and yes there are degrees of violence of attack of even hurting someone\u2019s feelings but I have trouble distinguishing between a woman, or a man I may not even know being assaulted, beaten, raped, robbed, manipulated, controlled or myself if I am the intentioned victim because violence is violence and even contemplating violence to me is violence and sometimes I think I am careless in my righteous opinions but today I renounce any unease, any guilt, any second guessing myself because today I realize it is better to be safe than wonder what if\u2026.today I know angels have always been my muse, my protectors, and the possibility of love isn\u2019t worth the risk of the repercussions of hate, and that not being loved isn\u2019t necessarily death, but death is not loving; but loving doesn\u2019t mean allowing myself to be someone else\u2019s punching bag nor does it mean I sit back and shut up and comfort you in my arms as you violently, in thought or deed, revenge an unjust world while I passively repress my discomfort.\u00a0 I am not ashamed of my many attempts to be loved, neither am I ashamed of running from what I hoped and thought was love but wasn\u2019t and there I go again judging, saying I know what love is or isn\u2019t but I do know what it isn\u2019t. \u00a0\u00a0Today I feel, though the earth is trembling, I feel a gentleness of spirit, a calm resolve, I feel like praying.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sherry Quan Lee<\/p>\n

June 13, 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here I go again, sharing a first draft of a poem, letting it go before the fear of releasing it can claim it to a drawer, a computer file, or a wastebasket.\u00a0 And here I go again, writing in the abstract, not being specific about what the poem is about.\u00a0 …<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-imagining-love","category-the-art-of-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sherryquanlee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}