From Moonlight to Manifesto: How Poetry Became My Queer History

Rediscovering the Moonlight: How 'Night Time' Opened a Window Back to My 15-Year-Old Self

To fully appreciate the landscape of my queer poetic voice, it's important to hold Night Time alongside two companion pieces from the same year: Who is 'You'? and The Sea of Love. Each stands alone in its sentiment, but together, they form a trinity of sapphic longing, imaginative tenderness, and adolescent bravery ... layers of unspoken truth woven into imagery and rhythm. Let me walk you through how each poem lives as part of my early queer history.

When I think about the poem Night Time, written on the 15th of November 1995, I find myself standing on the thirteenth floor of Edgar House in Hounslow, in the small bedroom I shared with myself. The window was open wide to the world. A world I couldn’t step into, but one I could breathe from. Outside that window was Hounslow Heath Nature Reserve ... my literal back garden, a sprawling patch of wildness that touched the edge of my field of vision and, unknowingly, became the backdrop of so many of my poems.

This poem, and many others, began from a prompt ... an innocent schoolgirl conversation. On the 16th of May 1995, my closest friend and first sapphic secret crush asked me to write a poem about hippies. That casual suggestion cracked something open. Words became refuge, became confession, became coded longing. What began as playful rhyming evolved into something more elemental. I started writing almost daily ... tiny poems scrawled into notebooks, often under my duvet, often late at night, when the house was finally quiet and the terror of the day had gone to sleep. My biological father, abusive and unpredictable, occupied that same flat. So, I wrote instead of screaming. I wrote to survive.

Night Time wasn’t just about the moon and stars. It was the first poem where I built a full sanctuary. It was a prayer disguised as admiration. The poem opens with delight ... “Oh! How I love the calm and silent night” ... but what’s really being said is: “This is the only time I feel safe.” The moon is watching me kindly. The stars are whispering back. The world is hushed. Nobody is yelling. No one is watching. No one is touching. Just the air, the sky, the rhythmic hum of foxes and trees, the real ones just beyond my window.

From a literary standpoint, the poem carries an elegant innocence laced with survival. There’s a rhythmic chant in the use of “Oh! How I love…” that mirrors both a child’s wonder and a survivor’s incantation ... an attempt to cast peace into the room through repetition. The moon, foxes, whispering wind, even the sleeping bumblebee ... these are not random images. They are symbols of quiet sentience. I was finding consciousness in everything except the human in my home. I was placing my trust in the night itself, allowing nature to mother me where people had failed.

There’s something especially curious and powerful about the use of the word “gay” at the end of the poem. On the surface, it’s used in the older, poetic sense ... cheerful, light-hearted. But now, knowing myself, and knowing the crush who sparked so many of my verses, I read it as something more: an accidental truth. A linguistic slip that hinted toward identity before I had the courage or language to name it. In a way, that line is me saying: “I am here. I am watching the moon smile ... and I am smiling back.”

The poem also demonstrates what I now understand as poetic dissociation ... a skill I developed without knowing its name. I couldn’t name the abuse. I couldn’t express romantic longing clearly. But I could write about foxes, and stars, and whispering trees. Each image carried a layer of meaning. Each line was a gentle way to say what was unspeakable in my home and culture.

For years afterward, I dismissed these poems as cringy, ridiculous, embarrassingly naïve. It was imposed upon me, subtly or directly, that they were childish or over-emotional. I internalised that shame. I packed those notebooks away, rarely reading them, almost never sharing them. In my younger adult years, I distanced myself from the girl who wrote them. I saw her as too much ... too dramatic, too sensitive, too weird. I forgot that she was also too brave to be recognised, too quiet to be saved, too full of feeling to let it rot unspoken.

Over time, though, poetry returned in fragments. Notebooks with just one line. A phrase scribbled after a birth. A single stanza after someone I loved broke my heart. Poetry became something I reserved for monumental moments. The quiet witness to life’s thresholds.

But recently ... through revisiting these old writings ... I’ve begun to see them not as cringe, but as miraculous. Night Time is a perfect example. It’s lyrically gentle, emotionally profound, and psychologically rich. It shows the mind of a child navigating trauma through romanticised metaphor. The night is not just a time of day; it’s an entire alternate reality. A place where the moon is a guardian. Where silence is soothing. Where longing becomes lyricism. Even the word “gay” slips in ... innocently, subconsciously ... a whisper of identity I didn’t have words for yet.

Reading it now, I see how much wisdom lived in that teenage body. How much metaphor was wrapped around truth. How those late-night scribbles were not just expressions, but life-saving architecture. I built rooms of language because the world gave me no shelter.

Night Time

15th November 1995

Oh! How I love the calm and silent night

When the moon gleams so bright

And when the stars twinkle out their light

When there’s nothing but the sound of night in sight

Oh! How I love to listen to the fox’s cry

And the sway of the whispering winds sigh

And how I love the star lit sky

And watch the moon say hello then goodbye

Oh! How I love to hear the night sing

And watch the stars ring

Wonderful is it to see the moon made king

What sight is the spider’s silver string

Oh! How fresh this fresh night’s air

Wonderful is it to sit under the moon’s care

And watch the stars take the shape of a bear

Thinking of the moonlit sea we share

Oh! Have you ever heard the whispering tree?

Have you ever seen a silver night sea?

Or heard the sleeping bumblebee?

Have you ever felt so free?

Oh! How lovely it is when dark is the day

How nice it is to feel the night’s air play

It’s nice to hear what the twinkling stars say

It’s so soothing to watch the moon smile so gay

Can you think of a better time?

Can you think of a better chime?

Who is 'You'? (13th November 1995) is a poem that plays with repetition as devotion. Each line begins with "You," building an intimate tapestry around an unnamed girl. But there’s no mistaking who she is ... not for me now. At the time, I was writing in metaphors because naming her out loud felt impossible. This poem touches every limb of young love: playfulness, awe, desperation, admiration. There’s an almost sacred reverence for the girl who laughs, who plays with hair, who is both 'my friend and my lover.' It's a coded love letter disguised as lyrical portraiture. The depth of emotion is unmistakable ... even as it hides beneath rhyme. And now, with distance and clarity, I can see how Who is 'You'? wasn’t just a sweet dedication. It was a roadmap of identity, sketching queerness in affectionate fragments when safety wouldn’t allow me to write the whole name.

Who is 'You'?

13th November 1995

Is you a dream or a fantasy

Is you just a face that smiles so happily

No, You is a person who I love a great deal

Who I can tell how I really feel

Who I looked forward to seeing each night

Who can have a relationship without a fight

You is my friend who has a wildest thought

Who hates to look at me because she is too short

You, who loves to play with hair

Especially that which is long and not fair

You, where feelings are concerned is so shy

You, the one that doesn’t let your limits be the sky

You, one that joins a crazy pair

That loves to float and fly through the air

You, the torch of my cave-like heart

You, that never seems so far apart

You, the gem of my eternal soul

You, who is like a river that does truly flow

You, the light of my life

You, the protector from evil’s knife

You, the one who flies around my heart with a wand

You, the one who saved me from the deep pond

You, the person who loves to twist and bend

To tease your loving friend

You, the life love song

Which is bound together so strong

You, my friend and my lover

My perfect sister and brother

You, the one whose love I need so bad

The one who makes my love go mad

To the earth you’re smaller than a dot

But to my soul you matter a lot

You are my life, my love, my joy

But you will never be my toy.

Then there’s The Sea of Love (15th November 1995), written just two days later. This poem is a dreamscape ... a lush, idealistic rendering of a world without shame, without hiding. A world where 'you and I' can float freely, embraced by blue depths, untouched by external judgment. Here, love is elemental. It's a sea, a place, a promise. While Night Time created safety through nature’s quiet, The Sea of Love imagines a future where love itself is liberated. And critically, it ends with a plea: 'I can’t swim alone, and you know it’s true / Come and join me in the calm sea so blue.' That line ... simple on the surface ... is one of the boldest things I wrote at that age. It was a request to be loved openly, to be chosen not just as a friend, but as a partner.

The Sea of Love

15th November 1995

What is the sea of love

Where is it, up above?

The sea of love is nowhere to be seen

And I doubt it’s anywhere, where we have been

It is an everlasting sea

One that lasts for eternity

It is situated in our heart

And there we can never be far apart

It is somewhere, where there is no fights

Where, calm is all the days and nights

Where we can drift towards the sunset

And not be caught in a hellish net

It is a place where there is only peace and love

A place where you can be anything, even a dove

It’s a place where together we can be at harmony

Swimming and diving in the deep blue sea

Where all our dreams may come true

Together forever just me and you, yes YOU!

Where there is no deceiving

And where love we are always receiving

Where there is no hate or lies

And where there is no sadness or sighs

How can this sea of love be found?

How does this sea sound?

If you search your heart and soul

It will be there, and it will show

This sea sounds so calm

And no need for alarm

It sounds like love flowing every and anywhere

It’s a sea that two can share

It’s a sea where all things are equal

It is a sea of love where all things are eternal

Why tell me of this sea of love?

Why would I want to be a dove?

You may not want to, but it’s a chance for you

I have to tell you this sea is for two

I can’t swim alone, and you know it’s true

Come and join me in the calm sea so blue.

Re-reading these poems now, it’s clear that I wasn’t just writing about girlhood emotions ... I was writing a hidden queer canon. A series of emotional artefacts that prove not only my identity, but the history of how it formed in secret, in metaphor, in moonlight.

Today, I don’t cringe. I stand in awe.

Looking back now, I realise that these poems didn’t just capture a passing crush or a moment of emotional adolescence ... they chronicled my earliest, unspoken queer truth. I came out at sixteen as bisexual, finding the closest language I could at the time for what I was feeling. It was only at twenty-seven, after more lived experience and deep introspection, that I recognised I was only sexually attracted to women. Even then, I still didn’t have the language to name it fully. It wasn’t until I was forty-two ... after years of re-evaluating my relationships, my desires, and my inner landscape ... that I finally stepped into a fuller version of myself. I came out again, this time with clarity and care, as polyamorous, lesbian, demisexual, and panromantic.

This journey wasn’t loud. It wasn’t always visible. But it was true. And it unfolded slowly ... not as a reaction to the world’s timelines, but as a deeply personal, often private, unfolding.

Queer identity is not proven through performative alignment. It’s lived, survived, hidden, endured, and, eventually, named. And I didn’t just live it ... I wrote it. As a child. With metaphor. With foxes and moonlight and aching restraint. I documented my sapphic longing in a time when it was dangerous to name it, when the only safe outlet was rhyme and trees and whispering winds.

That is queer history.

It might not be the loud kind. It might not come with slogans or pins or parades. But it’s the kind that builds the underground foundations queer generations walk on.

I didn’t deny my queerness. I sheltered it. I nurtured it when no one else could. And now I’m allowing it to speak again ... not with just a label, but with a whole body of work behind it.

What I’m doing now ... analysing these poems, placing them in historical and social context ... is reclaiming not just identity, but queer authorship. My journey was forged in the shadows, but it is no less valid than someone who could live loudly.

This is how queer history has always worked:

It lives in the margins, the diaries, the poems that couldn’t be shared.

It’s whispered before it’s sung.

It’s feared before it’s worn with pride.

I am not invalid.

I am not an impostor.

I am not too late or too quiet or too complicated.

I am a lesbian.

I am sapphic.

I am real.

And my history ... my poems, my introspection, my survival ... is not only legitimate…

It’s sacred queer heritage.

Of the girl who opened her window. Of the poems that poured out. Of the voice I’m finally ready to reclaim.

I’m writing more again. Not just in moments of rupture, but in the quiet between. I’m finally listening ... not to the world’s verdict on those poems ... but to the girl who dared to write them.

She wasn’t silly.

She was sacred.

And she still is.

A Prayer for Untamed Love: How 'Why?' Became the Cornerstone of My Queer Voice

On the 23rd of November 1995, I unknowingly wrote the manifesto of my adolescent emancipation.

It didn’t come with rainbows. Or pride flags. Or glitter. It came in the form of four-letter thunder: Why?

Three letters and a question mark that shook everything I had been told about love.

I was 15. I didn’t yet have the word "lesbian" in my vocabulary in the way I would one day hold it with fierce, radiant clarity. I had only recently started writing poetry, prompted innocently by my closest friend and first sapphic crush who had asked me to write about hippies. That poem opened a doorway. This one burned it down.

Why?

23rd November 1995

Why is it accepted that love is between

Boy and Girl?

Why can only they go together and be seen?

Why just boy, girl?

Why is it so ridiculous

For two of the same to love one another?

Why is it thought to be outrageous?

Why does it have to be a sister or brother?

Why is love only for the family?

Why is our love seen so wrong?

Yet this love sets me free

And yet our love is so strong.

Why is there love for a thing,

 But none for a person of the same?

Why can’t my love sing?

 Because it has to be tame!

Why tame love? Love is wild!

Why is it, love that’s the same is a scare?

Don’t they see, love is like a child

It can adventure anywhere.

Why do we have to follow tame love’s leader?

 Why can’t we go off on our own?

We don’t have to always cook the dinner.

We are independent and that has been shown.

Even now, decades later, I still can’t read this poem without feeling an emotional vibration move through my bones.

It was more than a poem. It was a reckoning.

 This was not a question. It was an answer dressed as one.

Back then, I couldn’t come out openly. I couldn’t name what I felt. But I could ask. And I did. Repeatedly. Rhythmically. With purpose.

Every line begins with "Why" not as confusion, but as strategic unravelling. I was interrogating the walls around me. I was pulling at the seams of every assumption that told me my love had to be hidden, censored, platonic, or false.

And somewhere between the foxes and moonlight of my other poems, I found my spine.

The Sociological Awakening Before I Knew the Word

"Why?" does what so many feminist and queer theorists do with essays and dissertations ... except I did it as a working-class queer girl in a council flat, pen in hand, rage in chest.

I questioned compulsory heterosexuality. I questioned gender roles and kitchen scripts. I questioned why sapphic love had to be disguised as sisterhood.

And I did it before I had the language to know what I was doing.

This is queer theory in schoolgirl ink.

It critiques. It reclaims. It asserts.

And it does so with a voice that is mine ... young, raw, burning for truth.

The Word That Changed Everything: Tame

The entire poem hinges on one luminous moment:

Why tame love? Love is wild!

That line makes me want to cry and dance at the same time.

You see, at 15, I didn’t know how to say "the system of heteronormativity has domesticated human affection and erased queer liberation through social coding" but I did know how to say:

Why tame love? Love is wild!

And isn’t that the whole point?

This poem was my soul’s rebellion against erasure. It was my subconscious saying: I won’t be leashed. My love is not misbehaviour. It is natural. It is free. It is alive.

It Wasn’t a Cry for Acceptance. It Was a Claiming of Space.

I look back now, and I realise I wasn’t pleading to be allowed. I was proclaiming that I already belonged.

This poem isn't afraid. It’s frustrated. It’s tired of asking. It’s drawing a line in the sand and saying:

I love this girl. You call it wrong. I call it sacred. Now tell me why.

And you can hear the answer in the silence.

The Girl Who Wrote This Was Not Confused. She Was Luminous.

She wasn’t being dramatic. She wasn’t childish. She wasn’t mistaken.

She was perceptive. Angry. Awake.

She was a theorist in a sweatshirt. A revolutionary in a borrowed uniform. A poet who hadn’t yet been taught to see her words as scripture.

She is me. And she was magnificent.

 This Is Now a Cornerstone in My Queer Archive

Alongside Night Time, and The Sea of Love, this poem belongs in the sacred series of my earliest queer voice. It was my liberation in question form. My queer declaration in rhyme. My refusal to believe that the love I felt was meant to be leashed.

I wrote this poem not because I was lost. I wrote it because I had already found something precious ...  and the world wouldn’t let me name it.

But I did.

With metaphor. With fire. With ink.

And now? I name it with pride.

This was not a diary entry. This was a queer thesis.

And it belongs in the world.

Author’s Note

This piece is more than an essay. It’s a doorway. A reconnection. A reckoning with the quiet truths I carried as a girl and the language I now have to honour them.

I share these poems and reflections not to seek validation, but to give space to the voices I once buried ... the child poet, the closeted dreamer, the teenager writing in metaphor what she could not yet speak. Every line here is part of my queer lineage. Every poem, a testament to survival through self-expression.

If you’re reading this as someone still waiting for the words to name your truth or wondering whether your quiet queer journey counts ... I see you. I believe you. And I offer this body of work as one soft reminder: your story matters. Even in whispers. Especially in whispers.

And to the girl I was—writing wild questions with trembling hands—you were never confused. You were exactly right. El xx