“Write your own meditation on grief, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.”
We dressed our mirrors in black, hiding our reflections from even ourselves. Our songs turn to lamentations, our eyes wet with tears.
How do you mourn your dead? You speak their name so they will not be forgotten.
How do you mourn your dead? You find their symbolic language and look for them every day.
How do you mourn your dead? You don’t mourn the loss. You celebrate the life they led. You wear colors so bright we look like confetti. You dance under a full moon to songs that feel like worship.
We visit cemeteries and talk to ghosts, whisper prayers to candles.
How do you mourn your dead? We celebrate the days we shared and forget the ugly rot of death.
Sarah Daly is an Irish writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sarah has written songs, stories, and poems for as long as she can remember, and is also a screenwriter with the British Horror Studio, which she co-founded with director Lawrie Brewster. Her poetry has featured in an Emmy-award-winning YouTube show, and been performed by legendary actor Gary Oldman. Sarah’s first collection of poetry is due to be released later this year.
Which poets influence you the most?
Honestly, I try to avoid being too influenced by others. Originality is the most important part of expression to me, and so I fear that if I expose myself to too much poetry, I’ll start to emulate other poets, or to unwittingly sound like them.
Undoubtedly, though, the poetry I read or encountered as a child and teenager influenced me to want to write poetry in the first place, and has had an effect on my style. Lewis Carroll was massively formative in terms of how he played with language. It was exciting and inspiring to realize that you could essentially invent your own words and that you really didn’t have to be bound by the rules of the English language.
As an angsty teenager, Emily Dickinson had a big impact. Her work inspired me to write poems that were cathartic and personal and sort of gave me permission to go to dark places with my poems.
What’s your favorite word, and why is it your favorite?
Sesquipedalian, which is a word for people who use a lot of long words. I just love the inherent irony of it, as well as the way it sounds. It sorts of skips around your mouth!
What has writing poetry informed you about being a person? How has it shaped you as a human being?
As a very private person who struggles to express her emotions in ‘real life’, poetry is vital to me. Poems are a place for me to put my feelings. It allows me to wrangle ugly, complicated, lonely thoughts into some kind of structure, maybe even turn them into something beautiful. Quite often, I’ll revisit an old poem of mine and realize it was actually me sending a message to myself, in a way that the fully conscious, logical mind probably never could, sort of like how dreams give us vital information about ourselves. Through my poems, I can see who I am.
And, beyond myself, it helps me to feel more connected to others. When you share something personal, and someone else reaches out to say they feel the same way, or they understand, or it spoke to them, then you feel more connected and less alone. It’s also wonderful to know that my being honest and vulnerable meant that someone else was able to feel less alone in their own experience. This was a somewhat unexpected effect of sharing my poems, but a very beautiful one.
What do you think your childhood self would think of your poetry today?
In a lot of ways, my poetry hasn’t changed that much! It’s improved, I hope, but it has a lot of the same themes, and a similar perspective. My poems are often dark, but always with a strand of hope. They can veer into comedy but usually with something serious to say. I’ve always been particularly sensitive to injustice, fakeness, and hypocrisy, so those are topics I’ve been drawn to speak about for as long as I can remember.
Basically, I think young me would be pleased to see that my core values hadn’t really changed, and honestly, I think she’d just be happy to know that I was still writing at all. It’s certainly not a given that your childhood creativity survives into adulthood.
When did you discover you were a poet? How did that process begin?
I don’t think it was ever a process, just an impulse. I’m pretty sure I was writing stories, songs, and poems as soon as words were available to me–before I could even write them down actually. I remember coming up with songs when I was three years old, singing along to my toy piano. I’m sure it was pretty awful, but it just always came naturally to me to arrange words into pleasing structures and rhythms.
That said, it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt in any way comfortable with the idea of calling myself a poet. This is the first time in my life I’ve really focussed on poetry in such a purposeful, sustained way. I’ve done a lot of different kinds of writing in my life, and always will, but it feels like “poet” is the best fit to describe the kind of writer I am.
Why do you believe poetry matters?
At its best, poetry can make life’s heaviness a little lighter, it can make us feel seen and understood, can turn difficult, ugly things into beautiful ones, can make us look at the world just a bit differently, and elevate us beyond the base, petty, and mundane parts of the world and ourselves. Poetry is philosophy made pretty. It’s the perfect vessel for truth and beauty, and right now, I think humanity needs both of those things more than ever.
I Speak Poetry
My mouth and mind were made to weave words into something more than meaning something leaning ever towards beauty
Bleeding truth out of the spaces between sentences. (The silences at times are loaded, golden speaking louder than sound)
Each syllable I spit is chosen for its peace or for its power for its grace or for its grit I sit with the blank page and I commit to making the mundane profound
Some poems meant to pierce and some to soothe to render safe or to make dangerous to shrink the whole life into a phrase or blow a moment up into a universe
Eternity preserved into a stanza Forever whittled to a single word an ageless expression of human feeling healing even as it hurts
Yes, I speak poetry but I am not unique every child was born a poet born complete with the sacred, ancient holy language every open heart can speak.
Remind me what it’s like to be exuberantly seven – climbing trees without worrying about the consequences of falling or bloody noses or if that branch might crack.
What it’s like to chase someone while riding bikes without worrying about skinned knees or twisted, broken bones.
What it’s like to be three – painting all the colors because rainbows are my favorite color and nobody told me my art is terrible yet.
Remind me it’s okay to be fragile like I was at fifteen, easily a pendulum swing, singing Fleetwood Mac with my boyfriend in the attic bedroom one minute, debating what it’d be like to kiss him, tasting pot on his breath. The next, crying because he’d rather play his guitar than go to some silly homecoming dance with me.
Remind me it’s okay to write the poetry like I did at eleven, crying, staring at the moon, wondering why God robbed me of the only people who understand me.
Remind me what it’s like to be in my twenties and trying so hard to be perfect and in control when everything was falling apart.
Or my thirties and realizing life is kintsugi and mosaic combined.
Sometimes, I look at myself and wonder who I am. If I’m just a matryoshka doll disguised as human. The mirror is broken. I don’t fully see myself yet, and I’m not sure I ever will.
Slice through the heart of me and wonder why I feel so raw. There’s bleeding somewhere, and yet I’m still searching for the cut. I’ll seek out the scars, but I didn’t know I was the one clinging to the knife.
Taylor Schwedux is an Australian self-taught artist and poet residing in Germany with her husband. Her journey into writing began at a young age, during primary school, where creative writing was one of her favorite activities—even in her free time. Over the years, she transitioned from many creative writing mediums, through songwriting to poetry.
Do you have any rituals when you write?
I do actually! When I sit down to write and want to focus, I refill my water bottle or make a tea on the side to drink, listen to lo-fi kind of music or music that helps to conjure ideas. There are some on YouTube I’ve come across where it sounds like you’re writing in a moving train or at a café. During these times, I also set timers. I may do a 30-45 minute session like this, or sometimes I could go over 2 hours just writing, turning off all the timers because I’ve been really in the zone with it, and my mind is burning with ideas.
Are there any particular poets who inspired you to write poetry?
Upon the first few poems I wrote when I was 13-19 and reworked for the book, I was heavily influenced by William Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had a lot of schoolwork surrounding Shakespeare and his plays. Also, not to mention – Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde and Robert Frost.
What emotions are hardest for you to write about with great honesty?
As sad as this may sound, I find writing about happiness the hardest. Happiness to me is not always as universal as sadness or grief can be. When I’m sad, I find writing is the one thing I go to; when I am happy, I tend to live in that happy moment and not write about it was that made me happy.
Since a lot of your poetry seems to be autobiographical, does it ever worry you to share it with others?
Honestly, before publishing I had fears of being misunderstood for how different my life and upbringing is to a lot of people who never had that. It was the opposite for me, I felt a relief, as if weight was being lifted off my shoulders as I set my book out into the world. (Explain why I went ahead and published and why being misunderstood never stopped me).
I read a lot of poetry prior to it being published, especially more modern ones and seeing their works made me feel as though I can do this as well.
What does your first draft of a poem look like?
It definitely leans towards the messy type. I have poems written in my phone notes app, in a writing book, on my PC notes and even at times, scraps of paper If my phone isn’t near me. Thankfully, I keep my scraps of paper in a plastic sheet and go through it as soon as I can , rewriting what I wrote into my book.
When do you usually feel inspiration strike?
Inspiration can strike for me at any time, and sometimes being 3am, in the middle of being in a deep sleep needing to quickly write something on my phone notes. Sometimes when I’m out and about, something may catch my eye or I hear someone say something I will write it down and also a tiny description of what happened, what I heard or saw; to help with documentation of the inspiration.
If you could seal any one line from a poem in a message in a bottle, what would it be?
I think the poem “Dreams” from Langston Hughes is what I’ll seal into a bottle. “Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly…”
Fire With Fire
To fight fire with fire, Or to extinguish the flame? Oh, how I love to play this dangerous game— Me against the dancing blaze. I feed my sorrow to the embers, Watch them crackle, twist, and grow, As the fire slowly learns what it needs to know. To fight fire with fire Or to extinguish the flame? Perhaps it’s this question, That’s bound me to this game.
Isabelle Palerma 