[be gentle]

Vidya Premkumar created [be gentle] from Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Vidya Premkumar writes:

[be gentle] was written as part of a found poetry project on Dracula organised by The Poeming. Over the course of February 2025, I found one poem each day, creating a sequence of 28 found poems across 28 days. This poem emerged from attentive reading rather than extraction for effect, allowing the language on the page to surface its own tensions and resonances. Dracula proved especially fertile for this project, offering moments that are philosophically sharp and emotionally charged beneath its horror frame. Within the larger arc of the project, this poem marks one such moment where the text seemed to speak quietly but insistently, asking to be held rather than reshaped.