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Poetry by Rowan Evans

Tag: poetry about writing

  • Translating What I Feel | A Poem About Creativity, Emotion, and the Writing Process

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This poem began with an image.

    Not a line. Not a metaphor.

    An image.

    A single figure standing alone, staring into the distance like the opening shot of a film.

    At first, the poem exists entirely outside the body. The speaker is observed rather than understood. We see the wind. The trees. The dirt beneath their feet. We hear a voice describing loneliness from a distance.

    Then the question arrives:

    “Is that the truth or the depression talking?”

    For me, that’s the moment the camera moves.

    The poem stops observing the speaker and starts inhabiting them.

    Everything before that question is external.

    Everything after it is internal.

    The scenery gives way to self-examination. The loneliness becomes less important than the act of interrogating it. The poem begins pulling apart its own construction, examining how emotions become images and how images eventually become language.

    In many ways, this piece accidentally became a poem about my entire creative process.

    I’ve spent twenty-three years translating feelings into words.

    Not just the dramatic emotions. Not just love, grief, or heartbreak.

    Everything.

    The strange moments. The passing thoughts. The questions that linger longer than they should.

    The title came from that realization.

    Because that’s what poetry has always felt like to me.

    Translation.

    An emotion enters one side of the mind.

    An image emerges from the other.

    And somewhere in between, a poem happens.

    — Rowan Evans

    A solitary poet stands by the shoreline at dusk as ink transforms into waves and moonlight, symbolizing emotions becoming poetry.
    Every poem begins as a feeling before it becomes a language.

    Translating What I Feel
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I stand, staring into the distance,
    alone in this instance—
    it’s just me and the breeze,
    running through the trees.

    I can feel cold dirt and stone
    beneath my feet.

    Wind brushes skin,
    feather-light
    like finger tips—
    it reminds me
    of how alone I am.

    Is that the truth
    or the depression talking?

    Because sometimes
    I feel alone
    when there are people
    around me.

    That last stanza
    moved like the tide.

    A long line—
    followed by one shorter,
    then longer again.

    Even when I don’t say it,
    the ocean imagery arrives.
    I don’t even have to try—
    it just pours out of me,
    like a dam breaking.

    Everything held back,
    rushes forth as the pen
    hits the page.

    You get the opening lines,
    that’s where the truth slips.
    Mid-stanza
    is where the truth sits.
    Then one or two lines
    to really make the truth hit.

    You see—
    this is the creative side of me.
    I feel something then translate it
    inside of me,
    from data to image
    then I spit it in ink on the page.

    I’ve spent 23 years
    translating what I feel—
    love, loneliness and rage…

    happiness and pain.

    Two sides of the coin,
    they’re different
    but the same.

    So there I stood…

    staring into the distance,
    unsure if I was alone in that instance—
    it was just me and the thoughts
    running through my mind.

    Slowly being translated
    into poetic lines.

    Journey into the Hexverse…

    [Where Music Becomes Weather]
    Some songs feel like storms. Others feel like shelter. Where Music Becomes Weather explores how music shapes emotion, memory, and the landscapes we carry within us.

    [Returning to My Bones]
    Some dreams fade the moment we wake. Others leave behind emotions that linger long after reality returns. Returning to My Bones explores the strange grief of leaving a dream that felt real enough to matter.

    [Recognizes Home]
    A free-verse poem exploring the difference between love as dependency and love as choice. It challenges the idea that love must be need-based, instead centering the quiet strength of choosing someone while still remaining whole on your own.

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

  • Copy of a Copy | A Poem About Originality, Authorship & Finding Your Voice

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This piece started as a diss.

    Or at least that’s what I told myself when I began writing it.

    The voice arrived first: irritated, dismissive, sharp around the edges. The kind of voice that has grown tired of watching imitation mistake itself for originality.

    But as the poem developed, I realized it wasn’t really about a specific person.

    It was about authorship.

    About the difference between influence and imitation.

    Every writer begins by borrowing something. We absorb voices we admire. We study techniques. We experiment with styles that resonate with us. That’s part of learning.

    The problem isn’t influence.

    The problem is stopping there.

    Because eventually every artist reaches a point where imitation becomes a limitation. A point where the question shifts from “Who do I sound like?” to “What do I actually have to say?”

    That’s the tension at the center of this piece.

    The speaker isn’t claiming ownership over Gothic imagery, confession, darkness, anxiety, or any of the themes referenced in the poem. Those things belong to countless writers across generations.

    What can’t be copied is the life underneath them.

    The experiences.

    The scars.

    The specific reasons a person reaches for certain images, metaphors, and obsessions.

    Someone can reproduce the shape of a voice.

    But shape is not source.

    That’s why the final lines matter to me.

    The joke is that the speaker becomes so frustrated with imitation that they offer to write the copy themselves.

    But underneath the sarcasm is a quieter observation:

    If you spend all your time trying to become someone else, you’ll never discover what only you could have written.

    And that’s where the most interesting work usually begins.

    — Rowan Evans

    A glowing handwritten manuscript surrounded by faded copies of the same page on a dark writing desk.
    Influence teaches the craft. Authenticity creates the voice. A copy can mimic the shape, but never the source.

    Copy of a Copy
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    You carry yourself like a killer.
    Yeah, of vibes—
    You think you’re intimidating?
    You’re not. Just stop.
    You’re embarrassing.

    You’ve had
    zero original thoughts,
    you just parrot me.
    You’re a parody.

    A copy of a copy,
    copied a second time—
    it’s obvious in the rhyme,
    you can see it
    in the quality decline.

    Take your pen
    and try to write like me.

    Gothic lace and confession,
    tinted with depression—
    written by an anxious mind.
    You can copy me
    line for line, rhyme for rhyme
    and I’m sure you’ll find
    it still won’t land right.

    Here—
    let me write for you.
    It’s not like
    that’s not something
    I already do.
    But this time,
    I’ll give the lines to you.

    Journey into the Hexverse…

    [Lone Wolf Theology]
    A philosophical pop-culture poem exploring freedom, identity, and self-authorship through the lens of superheroes, antiheroes, mythic archetypes, and personal rebellion. A declaration of autonomy in a world determined to write your story for you.

    [L Words & Heart]
    A playful, self-aware poem about love, longing, loyalty, and the quiet ways another person can reshape our inner world. What begins as humor slowly reveals a heartfelt confession about affection, imagination, and the faces that linger in our dreams.

    [Just Beyond Waking]
    A street that feels familiar. A life that hasn’t happened yet. Just Beyond Waking explores the fragile space between dreams, memory, longing, and the quiet feeling that some futures are already waiting for us.

    [Twin Suns, Sister Moons]
    A poem about distance, longing, and the quiet pull of someone who lives beneath a different sky. Between twin suns and sister moons, the heart keeps reaching for home.

    [It’s You I Choose]
    A poem about devotion, vulnerability, and the quiet decision to stay. Sometimes love isn’t certainty—it is choosing someone anyway.

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

  • The Daughter of Plath – A Poem by Rowan Evans

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    I have lived my life with ghosts in the room. Some of them were mine. Some belonged to women who died before I was born. This poem is my conversation with Sylvia Plath—not as an idol, but as a mother of language, a keeper of the raw and the unbearable. She never wrote for me, and yet her words built a room I have lived in for decades. This is my answer back, from the daughter she never met.

    Neo-gothic watercolor of an ash cathedral under a ghostly moon, with pages of poetry drifting upward and a faint female silhouette in the clouds.
    A cathedral built from ash, a prayer written in ink.

    Invocation

    Sylvia, I call you forth not to mourn, but to witness—
    to stand beside me as I open the ribcage,
    spill the ink,
    and show the world what it means to write as if the page were the last breath left in your lungs.

    The Daughter of Plath
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I was born with a beehive in my chest,
    buzzing with grief I never earned—
    a secondhand sorrow, wrapped in red silk,
    left at the altar of my ribs.

    Sylvia,
    you baptized me in bell jars,
    taught me how to scream without sound,
    how to find God
    in the burn of a typewriter ribbon.

    Your ache became heirloom—
    stitched into the marrow of my metaphors,
    your ghost weeps beside me as I write,
    fingertips trailing flame
    across the spine of each stanza.

    Where you were the furnace,
    I am the cathedral built from your ash—
    my altar bears the relics of your ruin:
    a curl of smoke,
    a sliver of moon-bitten mirror,
    a lullaby made of broken clocks.

    I do not flinch from the blood on the page.
    I have inked it into scripture.
    This is how I pray—
    with a pen between my teeth
    and my pulse pressed
    against the confessional.

    You gave me your hunger for beauty
    and your curse of seeing too much—
    the world peeled back to its nerve endings,
    the holiness inside horror.

    I walk your tightrope—
    between divine tenderness and obliteration,
    a daughter of fire
    learning to breathe the blaze
    instead of be consumed.

    I do not write to be saved.
    I write because you weren’t.
    Because I am.

    And because the ache still speaks.
    And I,
    your heir in ink,
    refuse to silence it.

    Benediction

    May every woman who writes in the dark know that she is not alone.
    May the ache be carried, not as a wound, but as a torch.
    And may we—your daughters, your sisters, your shadows—
    write not to be saved,
    but because we are still here,
    and the ink is still warm.

    Read Next: A Journey Through Ink & Flame

    If The Daughter of Plath stirred your soul, consider stepping softly into these sacred spaces:

    Love Over Apathy — Fierce devotion born from the ashes of indifference.

    13 Riddles for the Starborn Child — Whispers of whimsy and wonder from Roo the Poet’s dreamscape.

    Hymn & Heresy — A confessional hymn that dares to worship the shadows.

    Or dive deep into the full archive at The Library of Ashes.

    Feeling inspired? Support my craft with 25% off commissions on Ko-fi — your patronage keeps these flames burning bright.

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