Sometimes a place stops feeling like home long before you actually leave it. The streets still know your name, but something in you has already begun drifting toward another horizon.
This poem came from that feeling – the quiet moment you realize your roots are no longer meant for the soil you’re standing in. It’s not always about running away; sometimes it’s about allowing yourself to grow somewhere new.
Roots & Wings sits in that space between leaving and becoming. Between the life that shaped you and the one waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.
We carry out roots with us, even when we learn how to fly.
— Rowan Evans
Sometimes growth means planting new roots—and trusting your wings to find the horizon.
Roots & Wings Poetry by Rowan Evans (written February 18th, 2025)
These streets whisper my name, but I no longer listen,
my roots ache for softer soil, where the sun glistens.
I’ll plant myself where the palms embrace the sea,
then let the wind carry what’s left of me—
a bird unbound, chasing horizons yet unseen.
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.
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.
Poetry by Rowan Evans 