From The Shadows

By Rita J. Ray

The poems of this book reflect the principles of love, loss, and struggle. In a poignant, familiar way, they are coming to terms with human emotion. Their message is a snapshot of feelings expressed with self-awareness, captured within verses that are lyrical, intimate, and timeless. Like most everyone, I've loved and lost, lived to love again, then set yet another free. As a writer, I've always been drawn to the lexical, the interplay of words, imagery, and tone. One of the best things I've done in life is to come from the shadows and empty my heart, my soul--the essence of who I am--into the writing of a poem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662487552

Book preview

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From The Shadows

Rita J. Ray

Copyright © 2022 Rita J. Ray

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8753-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8755-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Loving with Blinders On

Prey

It's Always Been You

Pieces of Your Heart

Night Thoughts

Sometimes Love Isn't Enough

War

Pleasure

Love…Again

Room 152 at the Motel 6

Against Nature

Grandmother

When Love Dies

Our Day

Hindsight

Nocturnal Escape

chocolate melting on a hot summer's night

Mental Love

Eve

Eve

Reflections

Backgammon, Booze, and Baby Blues

Come Midnight

Winter Scene

Innocence Deferred

Foxes

When Whispers Fail

Moments

Rest in My Love

One Year

Assumption

Love's Game

Down the Hall

We Must Remember

No Disguise

From the Shadows

Passing Through

Saturday Night

The Gamble

Myself Again

Old Lovers

Denial

Little Girl

history

Before

Tears on the Pillow

Matinee

Can We Take It Slow?

Love Shower

The Sanctuary

Leaving

Wednesday Love

My Man

On the Crest of a Storm

Grandchildren

Eradication!

Freedom

Six Months

One More Time

Always

Living Hell

Recollection

Then I Think of You

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Clauses

Love Song to a Spiritual Lover

Many Years

Stolen Love

No More

Colors

Like a Stalker in the Night

In the Mirror

I Thought You Wanted a Woman

Farewell Note

Poetry

The Wounds of Youth

Hannah

Settlement

Before and After

Just 'Cause

Rainy Days

More Pain than Fun

Friday Night

Stop Asking

One fleeting insane moment

Irony

Coming for Me

I've Only Myself to Blame

Night Dancin'

When You Said, I Love You

I've Known Moments

If

I Once Loved Him

Please Don't Ask…

Replacement

Boys at Play

I Never Knew

Pals

I Want to Go in the Fall

In the Shade of You

About the Author

Also by Rita J. Ray

Because of Him: Poems of Praise, Thanksgiving and Devotion

Color My Thoughts (coauthored with Pamela J. Patterson)

The Dress (essay published in Tell Your True Tale, volume 5)

The Rabbit Died (essay published in Tell Your True Tale, volume 6)

All titles available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com

In memory of Linda Kaye Tate

February 28, 1948–July 6, 1993

Your love and laughter will forever

be with me

You can only become truly accomplished at

something you love.

—Maya Angelou

Favorite poems are like favorite children.

We definitely have them, but we never tell,

as the others would have their feelings hurt.

—Nikki Giovanni

Introduction

I know what it's like to take a wrong turn in life and find yourself starting in an impossible situation. At the beginning of my senior year of high school, I found myself pregnant; three months later, I married at the age of seventeen, then became a divorcee at the age of twenty-one. My twenties were spent raising kids, working as a secretary, and carrying a full load of college classes. On Saturday nights, after my homework was done and the children were put to bed, I wrote mostly poetry and some short stories. My getaway, my me time, was a corner of the sofa where I scribbled my emotions in spiral notebooks. The daily strains of single parenting made relationships with the opposite sex brief and inconsequential, so writing helped express things over which I felt I had little control. The discipline of committing thoughts to paper—revising and reworking the structure of a poem, for instance—was cathartic and enjoyable. Setting the piece aside and then