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Poetry by Rowan Evans

Tag: belonging

  • Just Visiting – A Poem About Not Feeling at Home

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    I’ve written around this feeling for years — in metaphors, in longing, in coded language about distance and departure.

    This is the first time I’ve said it this plainly.

    For most of my life, I’ve felt like a visitor in the place I was born. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a rebellious way. Just in a quiet, persistent way that never left.

    This piece isn’t about anger. It isn’t about rejection.

    It’s about finally naming what I’ve always known—
    that sometimes “home” is assigned to you,
    and sometimes it’s something you’re still moving toward.

    — Rowan Evans

    A lone traveler standing in an airport terminal at dusk, looking out at distant city lights with a suitcase beside them.
    Sometimes the place you’re born isn’t the place you’re meant to stay.

    Just Visiting
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I’ve been talking about it a lot lately,
    this feeling of wanting to escape
    that I’ve had since I was just a baby.
    I was forced to call this place home,
    because this is where I was born—
    it never felt like home,
    just a place I was visiting.

    Every day in school—
    I’d recite the pledge,
    like a good
    little patriot
    should.
    But I didn’t believe in it,
    there was no allegiance in it.

    They say they’re proud to be an American,
    well me? I’ve never been,
    because this is just a place to me.
    I’ve said it before, once in this poem alone—
    this place has never been my home.

    And I’ve lived all across it.
    Never once have I have felt planted,
    no roots took hold.
    Felt like a tourist—
    in a place I was
    supposed to belong.

    But I’ve known for a while now,
    my place is not within these borders.
    This place will never be
    home for me.
    But it will always be
    a part of me. (Sadly.)

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • Toward Somewhere I Can Breathe | A Poem About Longing, Disconnection & Finding Home

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This piece is about a feeling I’ve struggled to name for most of my life — a feeling that I have tried to explain more recently — a quiet but persistent disconnect that began when I was fourteen.

    It isn’t about hating where I’m from.
    It isn’t about romanticizing somewhere else.

    It’s about that internal shift — the moment you realize you feel unrooted in a place where everyone else seems firmly planted.

    For years, I thought I was running away.
    Now I understand I’ve been moving toward something.

    Whether that “home” is a city, a country, a person, or a version of myself I haven’t fully stepped into yet — I don’t know.

    But I know this:
    I am not lost anymore.
    I am in motion.

    — Rowan Evans

    A lone figure looking toward a distant city skyline under a star-filled night sky, symbolizing longing and the search for home.
    Sometimes home isn’t where you started. Sometimes it’s where you finally breathe.

    Toward Somewhere I Can Breathe
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I’ve tried my whole life
    to explain it.
    This disconnect,
    I’ve felt since
    2004.

    How can I make it
    any more clear?
    I just don’t belong here.

    I’m going to try
    and try to make it
    make sense.
    I was fourteen,
    Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi
    on the screen.

    But that’s not the important part.

    Inside—
    I could feel
    threads fray,
    and they
    already existed
    in decay.

    But I learned quickly,
    in 2007 exactly—
    there is Filth in the Beauty,
    and the reverse
    can be the same.

    That’s when
    my view of the
    world changed,
    and became
    cemented.

    Something shifted,
    vision cleared—
    and everything
    I missed before,
    just appeared.

    Where everyone
    around me,
    seemed rooted
    in the here.

    And I—
    would close my eyes,
    and wish upon
    shooting stars.
    I wanted out,
    I wanted to leave,
    go somewhere far.

    I knew it would take time,
    I needed things to align.
    But now I know
    what I’m moving toward,
    what I’m working for.

    I’m moving toward home.
    A place, where I belong.

    Maybe when I finally leave,
    I’ll touch down in the Philippines
    to walk Manila’s streets,
    and finally be able to breathe.

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • Disconnected Since Fourteen | Poetry About Belonging & Displacement

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This poem traces the moment when disconnection stopped being temporary and started feeling structural.
    At fourteen, I didn’t just feel out of place—I felt offline. Like my signal never quite reached the world I was standing in.

    The language of technology felt like the closest mirror for that experience: dropped signals, endless queues, systems that never respond. This isn’t nostalgia, and it isn’t blame—it’s recognition. Naming the feeling that followed me for years before I understood what it was.

    Some people search for belonging.
    Some of us search for a connection that was never stable to begin with.

    — Rowan Evans

    A person sitting alone in a dark room with glowing cables and signal symbols, representing emotional disconnection and longing for belonging.
    Some disconnections start early—and never fully resolve.

    Disconnected Since Fourteen
    (Lost in Queue)
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I used to sit alone, lost in thoughts
    of far off places—far from…
    home.

    I’d write about every one,
    write about them in my…
    poems.

    The way longing bled into art,
    art bled the words from my heart.
    It was the truth spilling—
    feeling homeless,
    since I was fourteen.

    Felt disconnected,
    like the Wi-Fi dropped.
    Mind static, dramatic,
    screaming like…
    dial-up.

    Trying to connect
    to somewhere that never answers.
    Server overloaded,
    lost in queue—
    endless, connection loop.

    I do not belong here.
    Everything feels wrong here.

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • Still Tilting Elsewhere | A Poem About Leaving, Longing, and Becoming

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    Some people grow up knowing exactly where they belong.
    Others grow up carrying a quiet sense of elsewhere—something felt long before it’s understood.

    This piece traces that feeling as it moved through me over time: the early moments of disconnection, the private planning, the slow patience of a dream that never burned out. It isn’t about leaving a place as much as it is about realizing that orientation matters more than arrival.

    Not all rebellions are loud.
    Some of them are lived quietly, for years, while you learn how to wait without letting the dream die.

    A person standing at dusk, facing a distant horizon with a compass motif in the sky, symbolizing longing and the pull toward somewhere else.
    Some dreams don’t disappear.
    They learn how to wait.

    Still Tilting Elsewhere
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I find myself
    drifting through my thoughts,
    not lost this time.

    I remember fourteen.
    Hi Hi Puffy—
    Ami and Yumi on the screen,
    seeing Tokyo streets,
    thinking “I hate this place.”
    It was the first time
    I felt the disconnect.

    Suddenly,
    I was hyperaware—
    I didn’t belong here.

    I remember fifteen.
    The first time
    I started planning.
    The first time
    I dreamed of jet engines,
    of taking off,
    making escape.

    I remember sixteen.
    Started speaking,
    manifesting—
    wishing it into existence.
    I remember seventeen,
    when my dream,
    became a quiet rebellion.

    And I was
    only becoming
    more aware,
    I didn’t belong here.

    I remember eighteen.
    Applying for a job,
    I knew I wouldn’t get.
    Simply for the chance to split.
    It was more about the “what if’s,”
    what if they saw something—
    what if they took a chance?

    And then—
    found family
    from the Philippines.
    Two girls of thirteen,
    they became like nieces to me.
    They were the spark
    that stoked the ember,
    that would simmer
    just beneath the surface.

    It’s been
    eighteen years
    since then.

    Eighteen years,
    and the ember never cooled.
    It lived in the quiet places—
    behind decisions,
    beneath routines,
    inside every map I drew
    that didn’t include here.

    And the dream didn’t fade.
    It learned patience.
    It learned silence.
    It learned to wait
    without dying.

    Now,
    I feel the shift again—
    the same quiet pull,
    the same soft rebellion,
    older now,
    but no less certain.

    I still carry that fourteen-year-old
    like a compass in my chest.
    I carry that seventeen-year-old
    like a promise I haven’t kept yet.
    I’ve grown,
    but the compass never changed.
    Every version of me
    still tilts toward somewhere…
    else.

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • My Heart, Population: You – A Poem About Tender Devotion

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This poem was written in February of last year, during an earlier incarnation of a project that has since transformed into something entirely different. It comes from a gentler season of longing—one where love felt less like fire and more like shelter.

    I’m sharing it now not because it fits where I am, but because it still tells the truth of who I’ve been: someone who loves in open doors and soft permanence, someone who believes devotion can be tender.

    Some poems don’t belong to the book they were born for.
    They belong to the timeline of the heart instead.

    Illustration of a heart-shaped city glowing at dusk, symbolizing love, home, and gentle devotion.
    A heart that became a home.

    My Heart, Population: You
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    You wandered in, no map, no key,
    Yet claimed this land inside of me.
    No walls were built, no toll to pay,
    Just open roads that beg you to stay.

    Your name’s engraved on every street,
    A love so vast, so pure, so sweet.

    Like ivy vines, you took your place,
    Wrapped every brick in your embrace.
    A cityscape of dreams anew,
    Each heartbeat whispering of you.

    No lease, no debt, no price to weigh,
    Yet still, I’d pay in love each day.

    A sunlit park where laughter rings,
    A chapel where devotion sings.
    My heart, once vacant, cold, askew—
    Now thrives with life, population: You.

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • Drifting Without Roots: A Poem on Cultural Identity and Longing

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    I have been struggling with my lack of cultural identity for a long time. Growing up in the United States, I was told it was a “melting pot,” but it never felt that way. Instead, it seemed like people were forced to abandon their heritage in order to fit into an identity that doesn’t exist. When I ask what “American culture” is, the answers I hear are hamburgers, hot dogs, the 4th of July, and the military. None of that feels like culture to me—only consumerism and violence.

    I envy those who have songs, dances, rituals, languages, and stories passed down through generations. I don’t want to take anyone else’s story. I only want to feel the presence of my own. But too often I feel like a ghost wandering through borrowed traditions, searching for a home that doesn’t exist.

    This poem is my confession of that ache.

    — Rowan Evans

    A solitary figure holding a lantern, roots dissolving into mist, symbolizing cultural disconnection and longing.
    “Searching for roots in the fog of identity.”

    Invocation

    Come closer, reader—
    into the hollow where heritage should dwell.
    Hear the echo of silence,
    the yearning for roots that never took hold.
    Witness the ache of a soul
    adrift in a country that mistook conquest for culture,
    violence for pride.
    Step gently—
    this confession is not just grief,
    but a longing for home that has no name.

    Inheritance of Nothing
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I envy the ones
    whose blood carries stories—
    whose tongues remember
    what their ancestors sang
    in the shadow of temples,
    at the mouth of rivers.

    I watch their rituals unfold,
    candles passed from hand to hand,
    dances older than empires,
    words carved in a language
    I will never taste.
    And I ache—
    not because they have it,
    but because I don’t.

    What was left to me?
    Fast food wrapped in plastic,
    holidays gutted of holiness,
    flags worshipped instead of gods.
    I was taught to pledge allegiance
    to violence,
    to wars I never wanted,
    to victories built on graves.

    My culture is gunfire.
    My anthem is grief.
    My inheritance—
    silence where a song should be.

    I drift between borrowed myths,
    a pilgrim without a shrine,
    longing for a history
    that does not dissolve into slogans,
    or rot under the weight
    of conquest and forgetting.

    I do not want to steal another’s story.
    I only want to touch my own—
    to feel it burn in my chest,
    to know the names of my dead
    and what they carried for me.

    Instead, I stand at the threshold,
    watching others feast at a table
    laden with memory and meaning,
    while I starve on scraps
    of hamburgers and hot dogs—
    a parody of belonging.

    Tell me,
    how do I rise from soil
    that has no roots?
    How do I call myself home
    when my home was built
    on erasure?

    Benediction

    May those who carry deep roots
    cherish them with reverence.
    May those who wander rootless
    know they are not alone in the ache.
    And may we who inherit silence
    still find ways to sing—
    to build new rituals
    from longing,
    to craft belonging
    from the ruins.

    If you would like to check out more of my work, you can find it here… The Library of Ashes