Hello, my
name is Ashley Lavergne and thank you for allowing me to introduce myself. I´m
a five-foot-four, brown hair, brown eyed, metal gypsy missionary poet from
south Louisiana; and, no, I´m not from New Orleans. I was baptized into both the Catholic and
Evangelical church, I´m the oldest of nine homeschooled children; and, yes, we
had television growing up.
My grandma shot squirrels
and chickens like in an old story book, my dad taught me about super heroes and
to enjoy everything I cook, my mom taught me how to survive in spite of what
everything is looking like, and those eight little monsters taught me to love
life.
Now, life taught me that music
is the language of eternity, and that poetry is words painting the picture of
what eternity sings – just like in the beginning when God spoke in a thunderous
chorus of creation that was a bigger bang than anything Darwin ever could have
thought of.
You see, words have the power to turn
everything around with just one simple phonetic sound – the power to send me
flying or crashing to the ground. It´s not a power I gave to them, and would
very gladly take from them, yet they overwhelm me. And that is exactly why
words and I have this love/hate relationship from which I have gained this
sickening tendency to write about my past – to let my mind dwell on things that
for some reason didn´t last. To dwell on that place inside of me where I still
feel safe because it´s the only time I actually understand simply because it
has nothing to do with the day at hand. But when I try to write about today I
seem to get confused – I don´t know what I want to say much less what words to
choose. Yet while looking behind I not only find the doubts in which I was
confined but also the Light that broke through my confines.
And even though people tend to
think that I´m living an old disaster – licking my old wounds instead of
writing that new chapter – it´s the memories of those “befores” that give me
hope for the “afters.” And for a while, I thought that they were right; dark
demonic clouds spilled from my pen onto those lines, but now I see them as
moments of heroic rescue and brilliant Light. I finally came to see that there
are two sides to my plight. I learned to see the very same day in two very
different ways: I can either remember how darkness became the captor of my
brain, or how in the midst of it all the Light kept me sane, but either way
it´s the same old pain.
So just as numerous condemning
verses seemed to give my obscurity it´s wings, one simple living Word came in
and changed everything. It suddenly felt like I was part of this literary
masterpiece based off of the real “never ending story.” As if I were that kid
reading and screaming for his mother making the foundations of the castle in
the sky quake. Just like that moment when you´re not quite sure if you´re
dreaming or awake. And it´s only that Word that shows me the difference between
what´s real and what´s fake. And that Word is the very same voice that spoke
and broke out crying “Lazarus, come forth from the tomb” and also called me
back to life from the death to which I myself had doomed.
You see, I believe that
just as Words formed this world they can also change it. Beauty is not only in
the eye of the beholder, but also in the Word that made it. So I can take my
pain and allow it to be with beauty painted, or I can take my beauty and allow
it to be by my pain be tainted.
Words are the only things
that can change even our memories – they´re the only difference between the
night that I nearly died and the day that I miraculously came out alive;
between the day that I attempted suicide and the night when a Verb so divine
came and saved my life.
Yet,
I must say, that the most interesting part of the tale is this – I´m actually not the author of these beautiful words but the story they´ve yet to finish, so please pardon me if I can´t
help but to be obsessed by It.
