How I Started Writing Poems

My first published poem found its way into the world in 1997, in an anthology called Embedded Dreams through the National Library of Poetry. But the poem itself was older than that. I'd written it years earlier, in my late teens — and then, the way feelings and poetry so often do, it resurfaced when I needed it.
That poem was called Birds in Flight.
I didn't set out to write about fear or memory. I just wrote what was true at the time, tucked it away, and moved on with my life the way we all do. But some poems don't stay tucked away. They wait. And when they resurface, they usually have something new to teach you— not because the words changed, but because you did.
The poem closes with these lines:
"…But the soul's only victim / is the self. / It's memories and fears / and the desire to be / like a bird in flight."
I didn't fully understand what I meant by that as a teenager. I understand it now—that our own memories and fears are the only things really holding us captive, and that facing them, rather than avoiding them, is what finally lets us fly.
That poem now appears in my new memoir, decades after I first put it to paper—proof, I think, that nothing we write is ever really wasted. It's just waiting for the moment we're ready to hear it again.
That's how it started for me: not with a plan to become a poet, but with a teenager telling the truth on paper, not knowing it would still be flying—and still setting me free, thirty years later.