For the poets who’ve borrowed their metaphors

To be a poet without a story feels like an irony because everyone assumes you must have suffered greatly to write something beautiful. That great art must be born of great personal tragedy or romance or chaos. Oh! her heart must have been broken a thousand times, she must have stared death in the face or she must have dwelled with angels. When in truth, she has only watched. She has only imagined. She has only borrowed. I have often felt like my work lacked depth because I had not lived. I feared that I have not bled enough to be a real poet. That my pain was too private, too unsharpened, too ordinary. I write of women who burn and boys who vanish into their fathers' wounds, of countries that devour their children and gods who answer with silence. But none of these are mine. I have only borrowed them. How can I write as though I have been split open by love or war, when all I have ever done is peep from the sidelines, my toes at the edge of chaos but never touching. What truth is there to offer when my life feels too small to hold a metaphor? But still, I write…because what can a writer do but write. I think it is small-minded to believe that great writing must come from deep wells — from ache, from loss, from having survived a thousand tiny deaths. Because what if all you’ve known is stillness? What if your body has never carried a grand heartbreak? What if your life, by most standards, is... quiet? I read the biography of my favourite poets and saw how they escaped war or even fought in war, lost their beloved, survived a natural disaster and my biggest life tragedy was changing my course at the university because it required Mathematics which i thoroughly despised. It made me wonder if this was what was lacking in my poems. Maybe if I had lived on the streets or become a refugee or had my heart broken mercilessly, maybe my work will stop being shallow and I could birth a revolution in written words. Do I still think this way? Sometimes. But I have also realised how shallow my thought was. Art must not always come from pain. Depth will not always come from tragedy. I will create beauty from hating mathematics and make my readers laugh with my shallow metaphors. Now, I see myself as a peeping poet. Although it sounds so much like Peeping Tom so I might need a rebrand soon.I write from the sidelines — from windows, not wounds. I take what I see, what I hear, what I feel in the ache of others and turn it into something soft, something sharp, something shaped like truth. And maybe that, too, is a kind of living. Maybe storytelling isn’t always about surviving what happened to you, but about honoring what happened to them. Maybe the poet doesn’t need a battlefield to write about war. Maybe we are allowed to write not because we have lived through it all, but because we have felt enough to imagine it. So I have been collecting stories like stones in my pocket — quiet, ordinary, human truths because: When you ask a poet  To make poetry of his truth,  What shall he say?  Which snippets  Of his insignificance  Shall he pen—  And call it beauty? What stories can he  Turn to beguiling  Lines of metaphors,  When all he has ever seen  Are the corners  Of his comfort,  And the dusty lens  Where he peeps  On humanity? How can he speak  Of life he has not lived,  Of a world he has hated,  Of feelings he has buried  In the ink of a thousand pens?

Other insights from Esther Omemu