Creative on the Rise!

Introducing Leonorra!

Leonorra  is an exceptionally talented and gifted poet, with remarkable passion and determination to make impactful strides in the world through her craft and this is very obvious in her zeal and consistency in the world of Literature, specifically poetry which speaks for itself. Her relatable and brilliant style of writing is exactly why Leonorra is now here on the most prestigious writers platform in the world. 

Today, we take a foray into the world of Shireen with excerpts below detailing her amazing story.

Hi. My name is Leonorra Dainler, 53, retired, from County Louth,Ireland. For much of my life spent growing up I thought I was paving my own path. I followed the trajectory with conviction leading me to a career in education, eventually becoming a school principal. Happily married, which I still am, motherhood, family all arrived. It was a life I had chosen, loved, and worked hard to achieve.

I didn’t understand that following the right road that seems right does not necessarily mean you’ve packed the appropriate apparel for the entire the trip ! Some things come along with us, whether we have packed them, or not. Old fears, inherited beliefs, ways of protecting ourselves that once made sense, assumptions about love, worth, safety and belonging that settle so deeply into us that we stop recognising them as assumptions at all, a complete lack of awareness of ownership of these beliefs all come along for the ride until their weight becomes too unbearable to carry anymore.

In retrospect, simply living my life held a series of lessons I needed to learn along the way. My most patient teacher has been my husband. We have been married for almost twenty-nine years. Our marriage has become one of the safest places in which I could encounter myself. Love provided the classroom and life provided the curriculum which has shaped both of us. We have knocked against one another’s edges, softened some, exposed others, and occasionally discovered entirely new ones. We are diamonds in the making, I like to think. Pressure has certainly been involved. The polishing continues. Different levels of buffering have been required along the way. 

In such safety, I could test what I thought I knew. I reacted from old fears and discovered that they did not always belong in the present. I could project, retreat, misunderstand, reconsider and try again. I began to distinguish between original and inherited , between reality and perception. Gradually, the learning traversed the confines of my home, beyond my relationship and into all aspects of my life. Patterns emerged that could not be ignored any longer.

I have no interest in apportioning blame on previous generations. Most people pass forward what they themselves received, often wrapped so preciously in love, with the very best intentions. I know that more deeply now, as both a daughter and a mother. I have learned that understanding where something comes from isn’t necessary. However, the choice to keep carrying out-of-date items rests solely with us. I cannot change what came before me, but I can decide what travels beyond me. This has become the most serious intention behind my writing, not for me, but my family.

I have two adult children. I cannot offer them a mother without wounds, mistakes, contradictions or occasionally spectacular lapses in judgement. That ship sailed some time ago. They will have enough to work through simply from having had me as their mother ! I’ve contributed generously. They’ve told me I’ve been too generous! Yet, beneath the humour is something I hold very seriously. I want my generational baggage to stop here, not because everything that came before was damaging, far from it. I inherited love, strength, humour, endurance and countless other attributes.

 For me, growth is increasingly about that discernment. What do I keep? What do I honour? What do I revise? What can I put down? At 53, I do not regard those questions as evidence of wrong turns. Quite the opposite. I wouldn’t change the road. I needed the journey, the experiences that challenged me, the relationships that reflected parts of me I couldn’t yet see. I needed to, repeatedly, practise lessons before I understood them. Quite simply, I needed enough life behind me to recognise the recurring traits. Such recognition brought a realisation of my personal responsibility. 

For me, poetry allows the past to remain where it should be and the present to live, without interference. I began writing, not with any particular literary ambition. It was simply somewhere I could objectively explore my thoughts, emotions and reactions.

There is something very revealing about committing a thought to paper. It provides space and changes our relationship with it. Inside the mind, it can masquerade as fact. On the page, it becomes a third party object of curiosity. I began to recognise how much of my inner world was constructed through memory, perception, projection, fear, expectation resulting in interpretation taking place. I realised that some of the heaviest burdens are not the events themselves, but their meaning that continues to echo long after. Writing became a way of listening for those echoes, not silencing them, nor denying where they came from. It helped distinguish an echo from my own voice.

I resist the idea of transformation as a single dramatic event. Mine has been much less cinematic. Old patterns still appear. I only recognise some of them sooner than I previously did.There is a peculiar freedom in meeting a familiar thought and thinking, “Ah. You again.” Recognition creates a pause. Sometimes, a pause is all we need to make a different response. I have learned not to give full authority to a thought just because it arrived first. I have become increasingly aware that I cannot control  what enters my mind, but I don’t have to offer everything a chair.

My poetry hopes to offer insight into the distance between an event and its interpretation, between loving someone and losing ourselves within that love, between remembering the past and continuing to live inside it. My words do not provide instructions for life, just recognition .

I hope a reader encounters a line and something stirs with recognition. If the words written, while trying to understand my own inner world, happen to find other souls travelling through similar territory, that feels like the best possible exchange. I can be their companion.

Heartache

Heartache interests me because it has an extraordinary relationship with perception.

Loss leaves empty spaces, and the mind dislikes a vacuum. We revisit conversations, supply explanations, rehearse different scenarios, remember tenderness, and neglect in unequal measure. We grieve the person, the future we had imagined. Sometimes, we grieve a version of ourselves, or them, we believed existed. Occasionally, once the immediate pain has quietened, another question emerges, “Who was I becoming while I was trying to remain loved?” That question sits beneath “Now That I Am Not Your Beloved”. While this poem has traits of a romantic relationship, the origins live in my strangely complex relationship with my mother.

The poem’s deepest loss is how far she has travelled from herself. Importantly, she realises that she is not entirely passive within that journey. She sees her own performance. She recognises the shade in which she has been sitting. By the final lines, her attention has begun to move away from the person who wounded her and towards the self she can still faintly recognise. The heart has not awakened, but it is waiting to.

"Now That I Am Not Your Beloved"

Now that I am not your beloved,

can I breathe,

not brace?

Our becoming brought my undoing.

Your dearth of devotion

draped loosely like a lead chain

around the chasms of my cauterised heart.

Choking,

stagnant blood soaked through my thin veins.

A vessel never meant for this.

Not words of wild hearts,

only weakness,

woven around my whispers.

I played my pitiful performance.

Shallow in spirit,

bolstering your unbenign sun.

Sitting in your shade,

you saw what you wanted.

Someone destined to shrivel,

silent and discarded.

I saw a subtle shadow

of my past self.

Never wild,

now wounded,

waiting for my heart

to softly waken.

Love

Knowing when I am responding to the person in front of me and when I am responding to somebody, or something, from years ago.

The second poem, Yesterday, speaks to this quieter form of love and learning to become safe company for oneself. The past can still send an invitation to visit. The first thought can still arrive. Rumination can still consider the invitation, but it no longer has to be accepted. The change is beautifully ordinary.

"Yesterday"

Yesterday keeps asking to be remembered.

But I am learning to ignore.

I can’t forget,

yet,

though I know past fires

fan nothing of value,

only collective delusions,

costly to peace.

Recycling past pieces

destroys today’s outlook.

Still invited by first thoughts

to throw on rumination.

But,

as I mentally dress,

I politely decline.

Refocus to now,

then its sequel.

I breathe into the seconds.

I am safe.

No suit of armour today.

There is a connection between those two poems. In the first, the speaker asks, “Can I breathe, not brace?” In the second, “I breathe into the seconds.” Perhaps writing sometimes recognises our progress before we do. One speaker is still waiting for her heart to wake.The other is standing inside the present without armour. Neither is finished. That matters to me.

I have become wary of narratives in which people are described as healed, transformed or finally whole, as though personal growth has a graduation ceremony. My experience has been much more cyclical, or more precisely, spiral in nature. We meet the same recurring themes repeatedly, but, hopefully, not always in exactly the same place.

At 53, my life is in another period of change. I stepped away from my career as a school principal to care for my aging mother. It was a significant decision, and one that altered not only my days, but my understanding of them.

There is something extraordinary about the reversal that occurs when we begin caring for a parent. Time folds back on itself in a peculiar way. This time and experience has also deepened my compassion for the generations that came before me.

It is easy to identify inherited patterns, once we have language for them. It is harder, and far more useful I think, to remember that the people who passed them to us were often carrying their own inheritances. We can see the need for change and not apportion blame for that need and, at the same time, honour the love while still revising the lesson. Perhaps this is why I feel such urgency now around the need for change.

My children are adults. I cannot retrospectively become the perfect mother. I can only continue to become a more conscious one. I can look at what arrived with me, keep the love, keep the humour, keep the strength, loyalty, resilience and belonging while putting down some of the fear. That may be one of the most meaningful things I ever do. Not because my children will then travel lightly through life. They won’t. They will encounter their own disappointments, loves, losses and questions, and as previously acknowledged, they have had me as their mother. There will be material. I hope some of their baggage will at least be original. I hope they feel free to examine what I have given them too.To keep what serves. To question what doesn’t. To love me without feeling obliged to repeat me.There is something profoundly hopeful in that.

Perhaps every generation gets an opportunity to loosen one knot. We don’t have to unravel the entire thread. Just refuse to tighten it again.

This brings me back to why I write. I don’t write because I have resolved these questions. Quite the opposite. Poetry has become one of the places where I am permitted not to resolve them. I can place contradiction beside contradiction. I can set love beside fear, memory beside fact, the person I was beside the person I am becoming and leave enough space for the reader to enter. My hope is not that somebody finishes one of my poems knowing more about me. It is that, occasionally, they finish knowing, or questioning, something more about themselves.If that happens, the words have travelled further than I could have asked.

At 53, I feel an unexpected sense of beginning. I have a husband I love and continue to learn beside, two adult children whose lives I now have the privilege of witnessing, a mother I care for, a career behind me that taught me an enormous amount about human potential, and a creative life I never anticipated.

There is so much still to look forward to. For someone who spent years as a principal, I find myself unexpectedly delighted to be a beginner again. No timetable. No prescribed curriculum. No certainty about where any of this leads. Just the next page. Perhaps that is enough.

I think differently now. To use writing analogies, we cannot control every plot twist. We cannot choose every character, nor can we edit the earlier chapters, but we can read them again with older eyes. We can notice the passages we have been repeating. We can decide what deserves another chapter and what can finally end with us. Then, if we are fortunate, we turn the page and write from there.