To be believed

For a very long time I couldn't get myself round to writing. Not that I didn't feel like it. Life is life on one hand; chores, family visiting, started Uni again after 12 years, husbandhood, fatherhood and so on. On the other hand, I struggle with all of this, this writing thing. I can't find the words to explain this struggle right now. But here I am again. And being here after all these months was prompted by Pádraig Ó'Tuama's memoir In the Shelter. Something I read from his made me understand at a deeper level or have a different perspective on what it is I'm doing by writing these poems.

The need to be believed.

I'd be broken-up everytime I'd hear an old story, a legend, a mythtelling. I'd be sobbing my heart out because I believed that story and everything in it, though my mind would be baffled at my heart's agitation. But I kept listening. I spent over 30 years not believing my own story. It was more like I never even considered it a story worth believing or even worth listening to, so I made a shield from it by telling it so bluntly and coldly so that I wouldn't suffer from it. But why did I even tell it then? A question I'm just asking myself now and need to ponder on. How I got from there to here, is probably the story that I started telling and will keep telling in these poems and prose. Coming back though, I understood, off Pádraig's memoir, something these poems have been doing all along and all on their own, which I'm thankful for, as myself would never have been able to cook this up. These poems are for anyone who have their own story that needs believing, anyone who can't, not even to themselves, say it, sing it, paint it, write it, but if they stumbled here, as I stumbled so many times, you may be able to read these poems and be broken-up, be believed.

Here's to all the poems saying 'I believe you'.