Poetry & Stories

My poetry story: When I was about 22, I attended a literary event at the University of Washington. I can’t recall what the event was but I was transported to a different way of looking at the world! There was beautiful language and fascinating images on the screen and I decided this was one thing I wanted to do with my life: to become a poet! I went to school to learn how to write and I wrote a lot poems, and was in a women’s poetry writing group for many years. But I was never successful at getting my poems published. So I stopped writing for a long time, somewhat discouraged. Here are a couple of poems I wrote recently that I hope you will enjoy.

The poems and stories on this page are copyrighted by Tamara Belland.

To anyone suffering from a long pause

(in their love life or life in general)

Are you feeling left out? Is some part of you wanting CONTROL over everything?

No more heartbreak, shame, risk of humiliation, too-much-trouble;

nothing unpredictable; no out-of-control anything. But doesn't a house,

when it is built, need a foundation and isn't the foundation a matter of digging in the DIRT?

And isn’t DIRT messy? Full of decaying bones of creatures, worms, centipedes,

rotting plants, fungi, bacteria, dead matter. Dark things that don't live in the light

and did you in your clean white tablecloth ways ever consider the probiotic-eating

bacteria in your guts—it is fairly dark in there and if not for all that goes on

in that darkness you would not be living here. In the beginning of ANYTHING

worth building there is this dark & dirty, "unclean" phase which if one is to look on it

in a judgmental way one would call it humiliating! embarrassing or even scary

when comparing it to the upper levels of the house which come later. But without the foundation or

basement, there would be no structure of any worth—nothing that would last.

It's just that you were only looking at the obvious & the good, the light, the pretty,

the comfortable, the predictable, lacy fantasy of real life. Let go and let loam.

Amend

I am writing an amend to the Poetry Editors who rejected my poetry that I sent to their magazines over the years. I came to hold resentment toward them in general and in retaliation I didn’t try to publish any more poetry for decades.

To the Poetry Editors who dismissed my poetry as not being enough, not quite good enough, not right, promising, quite an effort, trying too hard, not worth thinking of again; I wonder what she meant, maybe she’ll send something in later. Maybe the Poetry Editor did think about a line, perhaps one line was life-changing for her but the rest was trite or perhaps embarrassing for being too transparent; but I think they just didn’t get it, didn’t see the masterful! ideas within the words, weren’t transported, due to my expression or maybe she or he was not in a transportable being state. And so I see now, I guess, that it wasn’t necessarily me, maybe she or he was reminded of something he actually didn’t like, a sad memory or maybe it opened his eyes too wide in some direction or perhaps her pantyhose ran and she didn’t have any clear nail polish to stop the run (this was years ago), and in her panic inadvertently transferred my poem to the rejection stack. So I’m seeing it may have been as much or conceivably as much about the Poetry Editor as it was about my poems and the only recourse was/is to steady the self, to splurge with a new poem about how it is—how life is—for me now and how I see it and the snow surprising me today floating down from the white March sky as I look out the window at Bountiful Bakery and feel the breath of my reality breathe me and know that good things are in store like the trays of warm croissants the baker keeps bringing out of the kitchen; and how the world is plastic to my thinking and hello Editor, I am sending this Amend to you for ripping off all the poetry lovers everywhere, none of whom got to experience what I could have shared (but for my retaliation which did nothing but curtail my skills) though what I am now is admittedly still a work in progress as is this poem and I ask that you forgive me for thinking of myself only as I basked in my anteroom of self-pity. I blamed you for not accepting me and all that I was, and all I needed to do was write another poem, and one after that, and send it to you, and eventually you would have gotten to know me and we might have formed a relationship, and my poetry would have improved (as does all poetry with steady attention over time), which for years was like “an embalmed cherry blossom, closed tight against nature’s flow” and now in 2020 there’s this thaw happening from “the frozen color that was slow to melt away,” and you and I may be on the same page before long and come to appreciate each other, Dear Editor, as I am coming to appreciate me.