By Sierra J. Williams

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With the help of my mentor, Caitlin Chase, I was able to create a website using Cargo.com that would be both a portfolio of my favorite self-written poems and an outlet for creative expression.

Aquiline

October 2021 — Part of the collection Quiet Rebellions: Unchained

Don't watch me turn into a buttery –
I was never a caterpillar.
I never was trapped in a cocoon.
Don't watch me turn into a phoenix –
I never turned to ash.

Watch me fly –
She's an eagle when she flies;
I've always had wings.
I only needed to spread them...
Watch me spread them.

No more cage.
No more tip-toeing around you.
No more holding me back and keeping me down.
No more living for you...
in your image of me.
No more keeping my eyes down with my head low –
My chin will rise towards the sky,
with my head held high
and my brow strong.

You can often give it,
but you can never take...
Now it's time for me to speak my truth
To say what I need to,
even if it hurts you.

I'm tired of living in the tiny spotlight
of your side-eye glances.
No more leaping back from your pounces.
I was never scared of you.
But sometimes I could fall silent...
Still, violent threats never held any weight
In my mind.

Yet, I couldn't fly and lift my wings off the ground...

Now it's time to watch me put on a show –
Now it's time to watch my foreboding presence,
as if I were a crow.
Now it's time for the duck to turn into a swan...
Now it's time to become the queen
instead of the pawn.


Now –
Forevermore...
I live above your claws.


Freedom, Confidence

Haiku: She Waits

June 2020 — Part of the collection Quiet Rebellions: Unchained

Clouds
Blocking
The
Sun

In
Stillness
She
Waits
For
Song

A
Hummingbirds
Breath

Confinement, Hope

Frondescence

November 2021 — Part of the Spring Coming Early collection

As they woke up from their tombs
And the angel bells rung
And the harbingers sung
In a gentle perplexed sway of tongue
The bemused they had become
And words floated silently in the reflective pool of trite and trout

The water stirred, the trees bowed their boughs
Ripples in a desolate spring and pond
Spring had sprung and owers lunged
from the catacombs of the Beyond

Every season
For no reason at all
Had awoken the arisen from their caskets of daunt
And the disheartened and the disenchanted raised their voices in song

The feelings, the ubiquity, the brevity
of a season's greetings,
had come

Seasons, Depression, New Leaf

Peony Arbour

January 2022 — Part of the Spring Coming Early collection

The flowers' hearts are vexed near a winding stream
Life's lively slumber beckons them
And young love's agony,
haughty and bedecked with rosy cheeks,
shan't be for the faint of heart,
nor the meek;

For "fallen petals are not heartless matter"
And "rosy cheeks will all alike age with spring"
Leaving forlorn petals to follow and flow
alongside the current of an endless water-brink

Reected alone in the water of Springtime,
in the "shallows where the rushes bloom,"
Those who are youthfully rouged were under a peony arbour
And sulkily, the vexed stood admist the mist
As the wind wafted and whipped up thoughts
of that endless ebb of flowers, rivers, and time
They alone looked out into the haze
The thoughts filled them with the anguish of exile,


Like a cold shower of rain.

Love

Koi No Yokan

I. SILVER EYES

Silver eyes
Silver, sharp, brilliant,
and lled with the light of a full moon
I swore I could see the constellations—
No
the galaxy
the whole universe
full of possibilities
Within them
Within you
against the backdrop of the limitless expanse of your mind
The color of nothingness
and everything all at once
I see

II. COLORBLIND

Color me blind
in your innite hues
of blue
Color me in sadness
your withdrawn eyes
do
Color me from outside the lines
In due time
I will let you into
mine

III. UNSEEING

You used to be the only person I knew.
I imagined we were one
whenever we locked eyes from across the room.
I would look to you
as if you were a mirror of me.
As if by looking into you,
my own reection,
I would see.
You represented all I wanted to know.
You represented all I wanted to be.
Otherworldly
you seemed to oat down from heaven;
You seemed like an impossible dream.