This month’s poetry post is going to look a little different. It has to because there’s only one poem. I even thought about skipping the poetry post altogether. Instead, I reasoned, I could give you an honest blog post that talked about why I haven’t been feeling very poetic. Then I realized most of you are probably feeling exactly the same way. I don’t need to explain to you that our world feels different right now. It feels … heavy.
So I went back and looked at that ONE poem I wrote. I wrote and posted it on May 5. The prompt that day, which feels almost painful to see in writing after the rest of the month has passed, was “let me breathe.”
I’ve read the resulting poem three times this morning trying to decide if I should share it again. Because it has meaning now even more than it did before. Because it was almost too personal and painful for me on May 5th, it felt too REAL and too EMOTIONAL for me to share even then. Today it feels even more relevant and even more raw.
Poetry, as I’ve told my students countless times, is about emotion. It’s about connecting an emotion you have felt with something someone who wrote the poem is feeling. It’s about understanding, for the brief second you spend with the poem, that someone else has felt this way. It’s about being seen.
In that spirit, I’m sharing this poem again. I’m putting my logo and website on it just to claim it, but feel free to share if it speaks to you.
Thanks for being here. Your support means more than you know.
Leave a Reply