What Eight Years Did to My Poetry

I recently went through some of my old poetry files and discovered something mildly amusing: apparently, I have been writing about the same things for years.

Not exactly the same poems, per se. But the same ideas keep returning. Like love, hunger, home, longing, mistakes, the desire to be seen and understood.

What changed was the way I wrote about them.

Some of the poems I found were from 2018. They were softer, more direct, and very earnest. Their titles alone say a lot: Food & Love, Coming Home, Sanctuary. Elsewhere were titles like Fleeting Weather and Music for My Soul, which I still find very cute.

Then came House of the Gods, written just recently. Apparently, eight years later, everything needed candles.

One of the clearest examples is Sanctuary. The older poem is about being known well enough by another person that they can bring you back whenever you feel lost. Love is safety. The beloved knows your map and knows the way home.

Eight years later, I wrote Sanctuaire.

The same pattern is still there: another person has become a place of refuge. But the newer poem is much less comfortable with that idea. Love has become ritual, devotion, and repetition. The sanctuary remains even after the person it was built for is gone.

Here are the two poems for comparison:

SANCTUARY, from DREAMS, 2018

You already know my map by heart,

tracing dotted lines

with the tip of your finger,

so you can never get lost

You already know how to bring me back,

when I get lost

away from home

                              somewhere unknown

                                                                           all alone

You already know what to do,

a cup of coffee,

a lingering eye contact

and a silent wish

—don’t tell me!—

to have me back by your side.

---

SANCTUAIRE, from HOUSE OF THE GODS, 2026

I did not mean to make a sanctuary of you.

It happened the way ruins become holy: absorbed, bound, merged.

It was first the small acts of obedience. The keeping of your words. The way I let your name live under my tongue like a blade, like sugar, like a vow I had to swallow like honey and thorns.

Then it became bigger, moving, worldly. I measured rooms if they could hold your absence.

I sought spaces that I could build in your honour.

A door.

A threshold.

A chamber.

A place for kneeling.

A place for the mouth to be silent.

A place for prayers whispered like sin.

You were never even a god. But I enshrined you in small altars I go back to even when you’re gone.

I learned devotion from the shape of your leaving. I learned that worship is repetition. To return. Return. Return.

Even after your figure has cracked open and shown itself full of air. Even after the clothes of silk and velvet are folded. Even after truth has severed yet saved.

I was too young to sing a proper elegy. Yet I called it hunger. I called it beauty. I called it love when I wanted to be forgiven. I called it ritual. I called it devotion. Never clean. Never pure.

I still stand at the threshold and feel the old instinct rise. The urge to light a candle to whatever has wounded me most beautifully. To call that tenderness. To call that ruin by a softer name.

I sweep the sanctuary clean for something that no longer lives in its hallowed grounds.

And yet, when the dark comes close, I still set the table.

---

Then there is this funnier progression from Food & Love to Divine Food.

In the older poem, cooking is affection. It is hospitality, attraction, intimacy. It’s the desire to feed people, impress someone, and perhaps be kissed with sauce-stained lips.

In Divine Food, food is still an expression of love, except now it has become offering, medicine, poison, service and devotion.

Apparently eight years took dinner and gave it an altar.

Here are those poems for comparison:

FOOD & LOVE, from DREAMS, 2018

It’s the marriage of ingredients,

aroma wafting in the air,

outside the kitchen, the patio, the neighbor’s,

welcoming them to come in and join

hoping he could stay a little longer,

his touch lingering on your shoulder

It’s the assembly of the dish on fancy plates,

to impress guests with hidden skills,

to express the magic words

through layers of flavors

and be kissed with sauce-stained lips

---

DIVINE FOOD, from HOUSE OF THE GODS, 2026

i have cooked for people,

baked bread, made dishes

that fed the faithful,

i have witnessed the rise and fall

of those who worshipped you,

i have made not just soup,

but healing tinctures,

merciful poisons,

i have cooked for people,

sustained lives,

destroyed heretics,

all in your name,                                                                                                                                                     

i have made dishes,

offered them to your altar,

where you listened to my woes,

& absolved me of my transgressions,

i have cooked to save,

& brewed to kill,

all in your name.

---

The funny thing is that I did not deliberately return to these old poems while writing House of the Gods. I only noticed the similarities afterward.

And that made me realise that my subject matter has not changed as dramatically as I thought.

I was already writing about belonging, love, absence, longing and the ways people try to make themselves feel whole. The difference is that my older poems often named the emotion directly. They explained the feeling or gently guided the reader toward it.

The newer poems are more interested in giving those feelings form and letting them behave.

Love becomes devotion. Hunger becomes sacrifice. Home becomes absolution. A mistake becomes something a person may realise only after they have built their choices around it.

I think I trust the poem more now, too. I am less inclined to explain what the reader should take from it. The speaker is allowed to misunderstand. The symbolism is allowed to carry more of the weight. Sometimes the character can simply make a terrible decision and leave the reader to understand why.

That does not make me dislike the older poems. If anything, rereading them made me fonder of them.

They were sincere. They were gentle. They believed in coffee, music, warm lights, small kindnesses and being welcomed home.

I still write about those things. I just apparently developed another kind of fondness. Altars, candles, ruins, blood, vows and people making questionable decisions in the name of love and devotion.

Eight years did not replace younger me.

It simply gave her a different language… and apparently an unhealthy amount of Latin.