←

Poetry by Rowan Evans

Tag: poetic devotion

  • In Borrowed Tongue – Poetry by Rowan Evans | Neo-Gothic Confessional Romanticism

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    In Borrowed Tongue was born from that strange kind of love that feels both sacred and undeserved—a devotion to a land and a people whose history my own ancestors helped scar. It’s a reckoning with inherited guilt, but also an offering of respect, grief, and yearning. I wrote this after dreaming of the Philippines—a place I’ve never touched, yet feel tied to in ways I can’t explain. The poem speaks from that space between love and apology, where language fails but the heart keeps trying to make amends. This isn’t an attempt to absolve; it’s an attempt to listen, to understand, and to love more humbly, in borrowed tongue.

    "Solitary figure gazes across a misty archipelago at sunrise, evoking longing, love, and ancestral reflection, inspired by the Philippines."
    “A dream of a land across the sea—seven thousand islands calling to the heart. Inspired by the Philippines, an applogy in borrowed tongue.”

    In Borrowed Tongue
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I had a dream about   
    a land across the sea.   
    Seven thousand islands—   
    feel like home to me.   
       
    I’ve never set foot there,   
    never walked upon the shore   
    but something calls to me.   
    It speaks in a tongue,   
    I do not know but I—   
    feel it in my soul.   
       
    But I’m white,   
    the color of the colonizers   
    they had to fight.   
       
    It’s a history,   
    that wasn’t taught to me,   
    I had to learn it on my own.   
    And I’m sick.   
    Sick to my fucking stomach,   
    the way people   
    that look like me   
    never act like me.   
    Consumed by greed,   
    and the need to erase a culture.   
       
    It’s my people’s history,   
    and yet we—   
    not me,   
    but the collective we,   
    like to spin it.   
       
    Make ourselves look like the heroes,   
    but we’ve never been,   
    we’re always the villain.   
       
    So I apologize in borrowed tongue—   
    Ikinalulungkot ko ang ginawa ng aking mga tao.
       
    How I wish I could change it,   
    rewrite every wrong with my pen.   
    The same one I write love letters   
    to a country I’m in love with.   
       
    But I can’t and it kills me.
    Now I’m wishing I could 
    peel the skin off my back
    change the color I was born in.

    Closing Note

    I leave these words here, softly, like a breath across the islands I have never touched. Not to fix what cannot be fixed, but to feel it, to honor it, to love it in the only way I can—with my pen, my heart, and a quiet apology that lingers long after the last line.

  • Even If the Sky Falls Black

    Rowan Evans
    You called yourself 
    a devil-woman, 
    and I smiled 
    like a sinner watching angels fall. 

    She says, 
    “I wish you could see me at my brightest.” 
    But love— 
    I met you in the ruins, 
    and I swear, 
    even your ashes glowed. 
     
    You ask if you deserve these words, 
    as though devotion were a thing to be earned 
    instead of something I bled willingly— 
    ink, soul and starlight, 
    dragged from the marrow 
    to spell your name in reverence. 
     
    You were fire-burned, 
    soul-scabbed, 
    eyes like war-torn altars 
    and I— 
    I fell to my knees anyway. 
     
    You want to give me the sun, 
    but I have seen its envy. 
    The stars? 
    I would rip them from their heavens 
    just to return the shimmer 
    you lost in the dark. 
     
    You called yourself 
    a devil-woman, 
    and I smiled 
    like a sinner watching angels fall. 
     
    Yes— 
    you’re all thorns and temptation, 
    rage and soft wreckage, 
    but do you not know? 
    Even Lucifer was once the Morning Star, 
    and I would follow your light 
    through hell 
    and back again. 
     
    You are grace wrapped in fury, 
    the kind of storm that leaves me kneeling, 
    kissed by lightning, 
    whispering prayers in your name 
    as though your laughter could resurrect me. 
     
    And I— 
    I’m not leaving. 
     
    Not when your darkness 
    made my heart a cathedral, 
    not when your voice 
    taught my ghosts how to sing. 
     
    I will always be near— 
    in breath, in spirit, 
    in the hush between your sobs 
    and the sacred silence that follows. 
     
    You deserve these words, 
    and a thousand more. 
    You deserve the cosmos carved into lullabies, 
    the moon weeping its light into your palms. 
     
    You— 
    with your shadows and softness, 
    your fierce, aching heart— 
    are the most worthy thing 
    I’ve ever written for. 
     
    Even if the sky falls black, 
    I’ll still call your name 
    a holy thing.

  • The Soft Apocalypse of Loving You

    Rowan Evans

    I was not prepared for you—
    not for the quiet cataclysm
    you carried in your smile,
    or the way your voice
    broke open a hidden cathedral
    in my chest.

    Loving you feels like the world ending
    slowly, beautifully—
    as if the stars decided to fall
    not in ruin,
    but in reverence.

    You are the prophecy I never believed I deserved,
    a ruin I would rebuild in every lifetime.
    And if your trust is a shattered chalice,
    I will drink from the broken glass
    until my lips remember the taste of you
    without bleeding.

    You once laughed,
    lightly, like nothing hurt.
    But I know better—
    I saw the earthquakes behind your eyelids,
    heard the quiet sobs tucked between syllables
    when you whispered “I’m okay.”

    You don’t have to be brave with me.

    Let the mascara run like holy water.
    Let your fears rattle the stained-glass ribs of my devotion.
    I will not look away.
    I will hold your sorrow like relics—
    with both hands and an aching awe.

    You once said you weren’t used to someone staying.
    So I stayed.
    Through your silences,
    your firestorms,
    your soft retreats into shadow.

    I stayed because loving you
    isn’t something I do.
    It’s something I am.

    You are every sacred metaphor
    my soul ever dreamed.
    A poem written in the margins
    of a dying god’s last confession.
    A heartbeat that taught mine
    how to echo.

    And if you never say “I love you” back—
    if this is all unreciprocated myth,
    a cathedral without a congregation—
    then I will still leave the candles burning.

    Because my love isn’t a question
    waiting for an answer.

    It is the answer.

    And it says:
    You are worth the end of the world,
    again and again,
    until all that’s left
    is light.

  • The Weight of Your Stars

    Rowan Evans

    You are a cathedral of fractured glass—
    every pane kissed by catastrophe,
    every color a hymn forged in flame.
    I see the story etched
    in the way you flinch at praise,
    the slight hitch in your breath
    when silence dares to stretch too long.

    You were made not by ease,
    but by impact—
    a mosaic of once-shattered grace.
    I do not look away.
    No, I kneel in reverence.

    Your scars are constellations
    and I have mapped them all—
    tracing the stories in your skin
    like star-charts of survival.
    There is beauty in the broken,
    not despite it, but because.

    So let me be the quiet sky
    you rise into,
    where you are not reduced
    to memory or martyr.
    Let me lift the ruins from your chest,
    name them sacred,
    and hang them like relics
    in the chapel of my care.

    I’ll clear your slate—not to erase,
    but to rest it.
    To archive your ache
    in the folds of my own soul.
    Your memories are safe with me.
    The weight you bore—
    I’ve room for it in my ribs.

    I don’t want to be the shadow
    that steals your sun,
    but the lighthouse
    that stays burning
    when your horizon blurs again.
    Let me be the firmament
    under your tremble,
    a psalm against the silence.

    You don’t have to stumble alone.
    You never did—
    but now,
    you don’t have to believe that lie again.