réfléctions

réfléctions, my fifth chapbook, was written during 2025 December 16-18; it is 25 pages long, excluding the front cover. Like other chapbooks, I have not yet published it here.

The inspiration for réfléctions came from an assignment in my Seminar class: we had to write This I Believe essays, which are, as you may know, a style of essay pioneered by NPR in the 1950s and beloved by high schools across the nation. The assignment’s due date was 2025 December 20, the same day we went off for winter break. I asked my teacher if I could write mine as a poem, and she agreed; soon after, though, she went on maternity leave, and the principal of the Upper School division became our substitute teacher. Originally, I planned to write a completely different poem called “reflections” (no accents) and had made the following outline during class in 15pt font (Times New Roman, as always) on December 8:

“reflections”


The account which I was going to write about had taken place on November 22, only a few days after completing [insert title here]. It was a transformative experience as I was sitting on the hill of the school’s Courtyard; I was listening to “Cody Freestyle” by Steve Lacy, which has a luminous guitar solo at the end. The weather was overcast and cloudy that day, along with it being windy, but I liked the weather. As I listened, I looked at the trees in the distance, and mentally envisioned zooming out from the surface of the Earth, past the other planets, and into the galaxy. I felt a sense of rarity for the life on our planet, and overwhelming gratitude; this was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The experience was so transformative, in fact, that for the rest of the day I felt bleak. I usually do a “Mood Meter” on the whiteboards for each class, which is drawing a little square face which is either smiling or frowning depending on my mood; that day I didn’t draw a mouth for it. I came up with the excuse that it signified “No Data”.

I had done virtually no work for “reflections” (no accents) during class because I could not for the life of me figure out how to write it. On the night of 2025 December 16, I was up late to finish history homework; my mind flickered to the assignment and I decided to write it. But suddenly my decision on what to write about changed; I imagined my old friend, Frandrick, and thought that it would be a great idea to write about him instead. So I took a few minutes around 01:00 and produced “perennials in the winter”, the first section of what would become réfléctions.

The document history says that I was done writing the poem by 01:38; the poem itself is dated to “2025 décembre 16, 01h20”; it is anyone’s guess how long I really took to write. It felt like 10 minutes to me. After that, I submitted the document and didn’t look back until I got the grade back a few weeks later.

After writing “perennials in the winter”, I decided to go deeper, and over the course of the next two days I had produced nine more poems; I knew by the afternoon of the eighteenth that I would edit all ten of them together to create one seamless reading experience and meditation as it appears in the modern day.

The original version of “perennials in the winter” ends with the phrase:

voici ce que je crois

This was done for two reasons:

  1. The class had a requirement for every essay—or poem, in my case—to end with “This I Believe”. “Voici ce que je crois” is a literal rendering of that in French.

  2. Writing it in French instead of English reflects the bilingual theme that I was approaching it with while writing and also the fact that I just love the French language.