Hyacinth Harlow - kindred

Hyacinth Harlow’s powerful “kindred” puts the disparity between hate and love under their poetic lens, revering our human connection. The poem questions why there are seemingly countless ways to dislike and hate another, but only a handful of ways humans are allowed to love. Hyacinth told The Dewdrop their poem was “an abstract musing on the human condition that aims to contemplate our connection to one another; liminality and love, metamorphic understanding.”

kindred

we learn from birth a thousand ways
to stomach man’s iniquity, scorn and hate –
yet naught but seven ways to love.

with passion: eros
in sumptuous rooms with turned down lights.
with practicality: pragma
as i would find in the arms of a brother’s field,
shotgun-shells beneath my feet.

self-love (philautia) and love of the familiar (storge):
to be defined in remedial terms.
this one is felt in my bosom.
that one rattles in my skull.
my gut, a pit – loathsome, insensate – yes, sometimes
i feel it there.
pressed beneath a bridge of catharsis
on swollen flesh yet to be eaten.

seven loves.
a thousand grudges.
how odd that this
be what defines existence.
what changes man
from space to place,
what thrums in the center
of deepest matter.
gorged and gouged by graveyard flies,
born in blood to die in dust…

will my tombstone bear a name?

am i a husk of what i was,
the future of a self lost to waves?
apathy and anger?
resolve and reverence?

we walk in passion, softly passing
footsteps over trodden earth.
heart-to-heart in war of arms,
headless, faceless, crying
fortune

to be imprinted
on the walls of each liminal valve:

me, called aorta.
you, called a heartbeat.

look at me, sibling.
i am here.

Hyacinth Harlow

Hyacinth Harlow (he/they) is an up-and-coming poet from Colorado Springs, Colorado. His work is geared towards examining the facets of human fear, trauma and connection through a lens that attempts to highlight often marginalized perspectives.