Lots of people enjoy a good poem every now and then, but poetry has a whole other meaning to senior Kim White.  She started writing poetry in the seventh grade and has been in love with it ever sense. “I was immediately taken with it, reading and memorizing poems by famous poets like Lewis Carroll, Maya Angelou, William Butler Yeats, Nikki Giovanni, William Blake and William Carlos Williams,” says White.  

White lost her grandmother early this year to cancer, and poetry is a major component on how she dealt with her pain.  “I love poetry because it’s an outlet for me. It allows me to understand thoughts and emotions that otherwise stay bottled up inside me,” she said.  

White’s favorite poem of her own, inspired by her grandmother, is entitled “The Calm Before the Storm.”  “The poem starts 46 days after her passing and slowly works its way backwards in time through important events that have happened since she died,” says White.  This emotional poem shows how her grandmother’s death affected her and it proves how you never really know when something bad is going to happen, as White said, “In that moment, it’s just another night.”

Her favorite type of poetry is slam, because it “allows the audience and author to better connect in a way that traditional poetry doesn’t lend itself to.” Poetry is White’s favorite pastime and she will forever hold it dear to her heart.  

Below is one of White’s poems.

i’m sitting in my best friends car, staring out the window at the stars
and i wonder if you’re looking at them too
i wonder if the stars you’re looking at are the same stars i’m looking at and maybe i think about that because it makes the 725 miles seem like less of a drive
like i could just stop by and say hi if i wanted to
like it hasn’t been over 4 months since i last saw you
like this distance isn’t crushing my bones with its weight and turning them to dust
i wonder if you can get high off your own ground up powder
maybe it would make the room stop spinning every time i thought about how far away you are
maybe it would help to alleviate the pressure on my chest
but i can feel my heart pushing against my rib cage every time i see a car that looks like yours
i can feel it trying to escape the lock box i’ve trapped it in
i can feel my lungs deflating
old birthday party balloons that realize there is nothing to celebrate because you are not there
and it doesn’t matter how much my mind tells my heart that you won’t be there
it still skips a beat every time it thinks you might be
and i cannot pretend like my skin isn’t cold
like this space heater love doesn’t sputter and give out every time the distance might be too much
i have started to go on long drives to focus on something that is not you
or to make the distance seem smaller because if i can drive for two hours at three in the morning with no end goal in mind then an eleven hour drive to see you in the end seems like nothing
so i drive
and i keep getting distracted by the stars that you may or may not be looking at
by the songs on the radio that remind me of you
i can hear your voice coming through my speakers in every love song that plays
it reminds me where i’m going
i’m coming home
i’ll be there soon