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Merel Vdb Poem
The rose was fragile in its beauty,
Its hue the colour of romance novels and warm tea,
But these flowers aren’t flickers of flames in winter,
They were cold,
They were your soulless eyes staring up at me from a casket.
You became the still image of everything you should never have been,
Your hair was too neat,
Your honey blond fragments a solid streak,
It was always untidy,
No wonder you were loved so widely.
You were never a rose,
Never dainty nor small,
Pesticides and gloves were never needed,
You always grew tall.
I could touch you without bleeding,
Your thorns never pierced my skin,
You helped me grow,
But now you’re gone,
No sunlight or rainwater tears will ever bring you back.
When I sit in my garden and I watch the sunflowers turn towards that sun,
It hurts a little less to have lost a loved one,
But now I understand.
Not why you had to die but why you lived,
Your life was a garden of memories and breath,
Of the mellow sun striking the petals of yellow sunflowers,
That was you Cath,
You tilted towards everything bright,
Sunflowers litter my garden now,
A sea of sunshine smiling faces,
You are never dead,
For the blazing memory of you keeps every nook and cranny of my garden alive.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
The girls,
are growing up,
We forgot about that princess love,
The waiting for men to cover our broken bodies in their poetry love,
We let go of swallowed silent prayers of wanting to feel “pretty”
We ate their expectations and we vomited up the number of date rape cases.
So now here I am.
I’m 16.
I do not want princess love,
For I have learnt that more and more girls,
Are handcuffed to their fairy tales,
They lose themselves in Snow Whites Instagram mirror of beauty,
Until everyone is comparing themselves to the next “pretty”,
Until no one can even describe what it feels like to have joy or to experience happiness.
I am afraid of love,
Because of the only boyfriend I ever had,
Because he liked to take everything he couldn’t have,
All I have left now is broken syllables of a poem that once sang of my happiness,
So now I’m cold?
I’m afraid of cat calls,
And boys who laugh at intelligence,
And rape jokes.
I’ve been taught that love isn’t something I want to have,
Let me rephrase that,
The love that society shows me isn't something I want to have,
No more hiding my interests in fear of boldness,
In fear of the “oh” after initial interest,
I mean I’m tired of blaming myself for not being enough to satisfy Prince Charming,
Because I don’t have a pretty dress,
I have chosen no love,
Because honestly I am afraid that once people find that I’m hard to love,
That they will leave me,
Stranded on the steps of a palace,
Or broken down on a concrete pathway,
Or in the school bathroom after a sexual assault,
Or at the police station repeating myself over and over and over again,
because no seems to believe me.
But I will have to pick myself up
You know?
A teacher once told me
That guys don’t like short hair.
It was the day after I chopped off all my hair.
Now I know love means pretty.
But my hair is still short.
I don’t want princess love,
Cause I don’t need a prince to love me.
Cause Disney also taught me.
That a frog works just fine too.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
If you don’t get an A then you’re lazy,
you could have studied harder,
you could stayed up another hour just to cram the papers into your hair.
I see boys with earthquake hands from the four cups of coffee they chugged just to stay awake that morning.
I see the teachers who value good marks above their student’s mental health picture.
I see Failure tattooed on my forehead and everyone seems to have one too.
You father sits you down again
and he laughs when you tell him that your anxiety is flaring up, again.
He laughs and it’s sounds like your shaking fists holding a pen.
He says Lazy but I hear the frustrated sighs in the exam room,
I hear the girls crying afterwards not for themselves but because they are afraid of how angry their parents will get.
And eventually they understand
that learning just means passing the next exam
and we are programming their minds only for the next test
so we end up with a class of people who know the answer
but don’t even know themselves yet.
I mean when was the last time somebody told me it was okay to not pass that test?
It was okay to learn what it is like to live before
my head is once again drowning in everything I need to know but I can’t.
I failed a test last week
and when I got my results back I laughed.
Not because it was inherently funny but because I remembered that I could fail too.
I laughed with the sound of the trees whispering
and the children playing in the park.
I heard my five year old self with painted hands sing happy songs.
I heard all that made me human and it reminded me that no test could me any less of what I am.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
The weight of every exhausted metaphor sleeps underneath my eyes.
It’s the only thing that does nowadays.
I don’t hold anything in the chaos of my hands.
None of this makes sense.
But,
My brain is the crushing gift of God.
Sometimes it is a blessing
But,
Most days I am leaking juniper berries
Between pages of a book.
I stain everything red.
I have lost the words to describe how my days feel like frosted windows.
Nothing is ever clear.
But I keep looking through them in the hope that I will see
Something.
I will See anything.
I am in the edge of nothing
One step in either direction
With the fear of falling.
On step and my hands will
Once again
Paint but create nothing
My greatest fear is that I live an empty book
With pages that were written by someone else
With words that are merely casts of they should be
I am truly afraid of not living
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2019
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Merel Vdb Poem
You made me your home and when you left I became a haunted house.
No one wants to live in something that has been cursed.
No one wants broken shutters
or cracked beer bottles
or just a hell of a lot of boiling blood.
No one wants to try and fix the broken ones.
Everyone seems to head the warning sings-
get out I might break down.
They make fun of me and whisper
as if I’m a ghost story,
but they are afraid that I might hear them.
They are afraid that maybe they are Wrong.
I wasn’t drunk, neither was he.
I saw a thousand murdered souls
in his hands every time he hit me.
He broke all the furniture I had,
he threw stones at my windows
and he laughed as ricketed off the roof.
I can hear my glass shatter into a thousand shining dimes on the floor. Sometimes when I tip toe around the barren rooms
I can still hear them.
I can still hear his laughter and it rings
in my basement
even when I’m covering my ears.
But no one comes in here.
I bode in my white dress because I’m trying to convince myself
that there was never any blood.
There was never me screaming out my eyes in that basement.
There was only this.
This quiet twilight dream.
My face is pale because haven’t met the sun in months.
Maybe I look a little like a broken ghost,
but that’s only because you made me one.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
The final call of the last male of a species ,
Sounds a bit like a broken record,
Or maybe it sounds like choking blood,
Red, breathing and hollow.
It isn’t poetic
It’s just red
When we look at a wheezing forest we try to call it living,
We like to call the sick things full of color nowadays,
But they are all just factories
or houses
or broken down skeletons
The final call of the last male of a species sounds like
a lack of forgiveness to our bodies that dwell in the soil.
It forgets about how many iPhones we swallowed down our throats.
We choke on the wads of money that we spend on living Instagram empty lives.
Yet we forget how to breath through our souls.
The final call of the last male of a species sounds like the world crumble like weak concrete blocks
We like to stack them into towers to look like we have reached for the stars but we haven’t.
We have forgotten how to build structures that aren’t for the distraction of the broken bodies that sleep below.
The world is changing.
There is no more water in the flee in front of my house.
The last Sudanese rhino died 2 weeks ago.
We are losing more trees by the minute what has happened to the children?
We are choking on out lungs.
Someone asked me two weeks ago where the green had gone.
One day I’ll have to tell them that it was there but we burned all of it down.
And we will have a moment of silence,
For all the beauty that we have lost.
We have lost our trees, and the fynbos that used to bloom outside my house
We have lost the rhinos
And the tropical blooms of endless color
We lost or dignity
And the beauty of growing within or hearts
For what?
For some factories?
For some stone cold towers of corporal enterprise?
Maybe we sacrificed it for nests made of flammable money.
We only Know we have done once that burns too.
The final call of the last male of the species sounds like,
Like this,
This moment right here,
The destruction on the news,
The silence in the darkness.
The final call of the last male of the species is caused by us.
We have swallowed harmony
And coughed extinction numbers.
It won’t be long till everything we have will burn too.
- Here is my reading of the poem :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsMXUh7OCPo&t=7s
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
We are at the age where our memory begins to turn selective,
We chose what we want to remember and we tend to forget the rest.
Yet We have forgotten how to love,
We have stuffed so many cotton candy words into our mouths that we have chocked on our lungs.
We choke on the pretty packaging and on the sad eyes of someone who doesn’t have a crush.
We loose ourselves to how many insta-likes we’ve got,
yet we forgot about our mothers in the kitchen polishing our kindergarten pictures,
wondering where we’d gone.
We have gotten lost,
in a society that paints love only in the shade of cheep romance movies.
We see everything we haven’t got.
We have forgotten how to love,
and I say this because I know that some girls spend hours in front of the mirror not feeling pretty enough.
You do need anyone else’s satisfaction in order to feel worthy enough of the love you give yourself.
We get lost in the noise that we forgot about ourselves.
We forget about our families and our friends.
We forget that there is more than one type of love.
Love, doesn’t just mean chocolates,
or how many flowers you’ve been given by someone else,
or how many cards people write for you.
You must fall in love with entitreity that is yourself first.
I mean let’s laugh out loud.
Let’s open the windows and beckon for clouds.
We get to decide our definition of love.
I hope you pick wild flowers off the side of the road,
that you fall in love with how your friends eyes light up when they talk about something they love,
Go hug your mother or your father tell them you love them,
or maybe just bake a cake, G
et some colorful icing and share your love with all those that care for you too.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
I am not what I once was,
I have bled all the heat of forgotten mythes,
Old stories of fire,
And burning
and burning
and burning
I have set everything alight.
You walk alongside me ignorant of what I once held,
The wrath of Hades,
But now only a crater.
Now only a lake.
You walk alongside me,
My red now gone,
The wrath now tears of endless blue.
I am now only a whisper,
No one will remember me
No one can say my name
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2019
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Merel Vdb Poem
Mom you can’t touch me anymore
Because at the end of the day
People are not poetry,
We cannot sing lies into coats anymore.
We cannot imagine wool out of cardboard
crayon boxes.
Mom,
Warmth is not warmth unless we let it be.
But now you’ve dressed me,
In a veneer of fluttering news articles
Depicting my loneliness,
I am still a child.
Well I am supposed to be.
I think.
Mom
People stopped being science experiments
They stopped swallowing the songbirds
that cracked open their rib cages.
They stopped making jam in their eyelids.
Mom.
Everything is bruised
Everything is bleeding
Mom.
No one can see through the stars.
I think
I’m blind.
I think it doesn’t matter how we cover our cheeks
You can still see our tears through it.
Mom.
My face is a watercolor painting in the rain,
popsicles left out in the sun ,
butter in a sauce pan
Mom.
I think I’m trying to find a million ways to tell you
That I’m melting
I’m crushing myself into the folds of my tongue
Mom
You can’t see me.
But I’m crying mom
I’m melting
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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Merel Vdb Poem
It all starts when your 13,
and all the girls they want to be queens.
They all wanted to have crowns of gold and steal.
They wanted to rule kingdoms that were their body’s and it all started out kind.
I mean we were all just our mothers children,
learning to love castles which already had canon holes that shattered our foundations and this is the age where we learn to walk home.
Where our mothers sit us down and tell us about angry men
and their hands and their words.
Where my mother gave me a can of pepper spray and said Incase,
she said
incase.
The first time I walked home with a tiara balanced on my head
a shadow of a man followed me back
and whispered ugly into my ears,
and I believed him.
So my crown fell,
the jewels shattered on the ground along with my teardrops,
my silken dress exchanged for armor,
I wiped of my smile,
and cleaned the blood that crusted my knee caps.
I, I had to get back up the next day and do it all over again.
But,
I whispered to all the silent sins make me queen or I’ll make you scream.
And they finally bowed down until their knees scrapped on the ground and bled all the horrid broken syllables that they yelled at me from the streets.
I am not a whore,
or a pretty little thing,
or your “baby”,
I am neither a slut nor your plaything,
or something you can grab at with your grubby fingers as if I’m a toy.
So I try and walk away now with a crown of broken mirrors
resting gently on my hair.
I hope that you see yourself in them,
I hope you swallow your reflection,
it mirrors your ugly crumbling hands that seem to shake when you drink your alcohol,
it shows the reflection of your mother who still wonders why you sit on the streets when you could have been home helping her make dinner.
But it doesn’t matter cause my mother will sit at home and her words of “be careful” will still echo in my footsteps on my way home,
and I don’t know if anyone will hear
them except maybe the pepper spray that guards my school bag
and the girls that whisper of their fear in the locker rooms.
I will walk a little faster,
glancing over my shoulder as I go
and I’ll wonder if anything will ever
change.
Copyright © Merel Vdb | Year Posted 2018
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