Two years ago, I asked some of my friends to send me one word describing their life at that moment. The response was varied with emotions ranging from excitement to loss and despair. These words inspired me to try and capture the stories of the women in my life and this experiment evolved into a small collection of poetry. The poems were abandoned for over a year when a new idea occurred to me… My sister’s an extremely talented artist and I’ve always admired her ability to catch a moment or emotion with her art. We’d been talking about collaborating on a project, so I sent her some of these poems and she worked on illustrations to accompany them. Her illustrations developed and shaped the stories in a completely new way, which allowed me to reduce the poems to their bare essence.

Here are the first results of our fun collaboration! We’re excited to share these with you and we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed creating them.

reckless

uncertain

at first

she left gravity behind

      then shrugged it off

as something redundant

the grass softly pleaded:

please return

to reason

don’t you dare

with a lion’s heart

she strides into the unknown

with a lamb’s heart

she stands before the door

and knocks

the frown

absentmindedly

etched

into her forehead

for all to see

neatly framed

by two fissures

filled

with thoughts

Thanks for reading! For more poetry, try Lost in London.