Things I Learned Last Year

Things I Learned Last Year

Sweat drops and teardrops are both salty.

Every cell in your skin 

is replaced every four months.

Hangnails don't go away

unless you cut them.

A violin hickey

is a badge of honor

that gets you places.

Scars heal from the inside out.

The more you pick at split ends,

the more of them you get.

Everything you see on a person's exterior 

is dead.

The faster you rip off a band-aid,

the less it hurts, but first you have to 

be brave enough.

2015. What a year. Filled with the starkest of contrasts: success and failure, forgiveness and revenge, defiance and conformity, pride and guilt, passion and regret, a few steps closer to finding myself—2015 saw it all.

My poem focuses on a few specific aspects of my life the past year, using skin or hair to symbolize something different in every stanza. The first two or three stanzas simply sound like statements with a matter-of-fact tone, but this progresses into slight arrogance in the fourth stanza, pain and remembrance in the fifth, regret in the sixth, reflection in the seventh, and reflection and empowerment (the only positive stanza!) in the last. Only after reading through the last few stanzas does it become apparent that each statement, even the ones in the beginning that seem like simple facts, have a symbolic meaning. Overall, the tone of the poem is reflective and melancholy/slightly regretful.

I sort of tried to mirror Stafford's poem structure by using run-on lines and only one thought per stanza. I also paid attention to the number of lines in each stanza (something I do not normally like to do), which is a 1-2-2-3-1-2-2-3 pattern. I did not really use any of the other features in his poem, like sentence structures or the topics he used. Mine was less about what I learned about the world in general, and more about a specific, personal reflection about how I have grown.