Of Poetry
By Makena Gillespie

Ink falls on the page
Staining letters on the parchment
Intricate webs of words created
To trap the mind in their flashy styling
Hidden meaning blurred beneath
The unrealistic language
Of poetry

Extraneous spaces complicate
The reading of ideas
While exuberantly abnormal words
Strain to impress the readers
Attempting to inspire,
Falling into mundane chaos
The unexplainable farce
Of poetry

Syllables and meter
Rhythm and rhyme
Prose and free verse
A language of the untold
But silently spoken
Right is wrong
But I always seem wrong
The obscure style
Of poetry

When blue is sad
Stars are hope
And night is emptiness
Everything must have meaning
Blue cannot be a simple color
Stars must be more than burning gas
And night can no longer be a time
We blindly search, saying we can see,
Understand the labyrinth like universe
Of poetry

Feelings are not stated
They are hidden within
An alternate reality
Where evasive expressions
Are rewarded, instead of challenged
Where facts say nothing
But meaningless words scream
Where cerebral thinking is a sin
And illogical romanticism is embraced
The extraneously exaggerated meaning
Of poetry

Makena Gillespie is a sophomore at Nipomo High School with quite a few interests. She participates in the school band, soccer team, tennis team, and track team, which does not always leaving a lot of room for other hobbies. She has always enjoyed reading, although it didn’t always come easy to her. However, poetry has never been a particularly enjoyable experience for her. Given an assignment to write a poem was dreadful, so she decided to write a poem about the very feelings that made the assignment so difficult.