The First Time a Poem Saved Me

I still remember the night I sat on the cold bathroom floor, back pressed against the tub, holding a dog-eared copy of Mary Oliver’s Devotions. I wasn’t looking for answers. I wasn’t even sure I was looking for comfort. I was simply exhausted in the way that grief makes you exhausted — hollowed out, like someone had taken a spoon to your insides and left nothing but the shell of you behind.

And then I read a line. Just one line. And something in my chest cracked open in the most tender way.

That’s what poetry does. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Poetry Is Not What They Taught You in School

For so many of us, poetry was ruined somewhere between ninth grade and a standardized test. We were handed a poem, told to dissect it like a frog pinned to a tray, and asked to explain what the author “really meant.” As if meaning were something buried and hidden, something you had to excavate with the right academic tools.

But here’s what I want you to unlearn: poetry doesn’t require your analysis. It requires your presence.

Poetry is not a puzzle to be solved. It is an experience to be felt. It is the art form that lives closest to the body — to breath, to heartbeat, to the catch in your throat when someone finally says the thing you couldn’t say yourself. When you let go of the need to understand a poem and simply allow yourself to receive it, something extraordinary becomes possible.

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” — Rita Dove

I believe this with my whole heart. And I believe that this distillation is exactly what makes poetry so uniquely healing.

Why Poetry Heals Differently Than Other Writing

Journaling is one of my deepest loves — you know this about me if you’ve been here for a while. There is real medicine in the long pour of prose, in writing pages and pages until you find the truth hiding at the bottom of the page. But poetry works differently. Poetry works faster, and it works in the places that prose sometimes can’t quite reach.

It Gives Shape to the Shapeless

Grief, depression, anxiety, longing — these are formless things. They live in the body as sensation and pressure and weight, but they resist easy description. When we try to explain our pain in plain language, we often end up speaking in approximations. I feel sad. I feel lost. I don’t know how to explain it.

Poetry, by its very nature, traffics in the ineffable. It uses image and metaphor and rhythm to gesture toward what language alone cannot contain. When you read a poem that names your pain in a way you never could, you feel something release in you. You feel less alone. You feel, maybe for the first time in a long time, seen.

It Slows You Down

We live in a world that rewards speed. We skim, scroll, consume, and move on. Poetry refuses this. A good poem demands that you slow down, that you read it again, that you sit with a single image for a moment longer than feels comfortable. This enforced slowness is itself a kind of healing. It pulls you out of the anxious rush of your own mind and anchors you to this word, this line, this breath.

It Gives You Permission

This is the one I don’t talk about enough. When you read a poem in which someone has written honestly about their darkness, their desire, their shame, their wild and inconvenient love — something in you exhales. Because if someone else felt this and wrote it down and sent it into the world, then maybe you are allowed to feel it too. Poetry normalizes the full range of human experience. It makes room for all of it.

Writing Your Own: You Don’t Have to Be a Poet

I hear this all the time: “I could never write poetry. I’m not a poet.” And I want to gently, lovingly push back on that every single time.

You don’t have to be a poet to write poetry. You just have to be honest.

Some of the most healing poems I’ve ever encountered were written by people who would never call themselves writers — people who sat down, picked up a pen, and simply tried to tell the truth about what they were carrying. There is no wrong way to do this. There is no form you must follow, no rhyme scheme you must honor, no literary device you must employ.

A Simple Practice to Begin

If you’ve never written a poem before and the blank page feels daunting, try this: think of one feeling you’ve been carrying lately. Just one. Now think of something in the physical world — an object, a place, a weather pattern — that somehow reminds you of that feeling. Write about the physical thing. Describe it slowly, carefully, with as much sensory detail as you can. Let the feeling speak through the image without ever naming it directly.

That’s a poem. You just wrote one.

The page does not need you to arrive with answers. It only needs you to arrive honestly, with whatever you are carrying today.

An Invitation

This month, I want to invite you into a deeper relationship with poetry — both as a reader and as a writer. Pull a book of poems off the shelf, or find one at the library, or simply search for a poet whose name you’ve always been curious about. Read one poem a day, slowly, with your full attention. And once a week, try writing one yourself.

You don’t have to share it. You don’t have to show anyone. Just let the language do its quiet work on you, the way it has done for me on so many cold floors and dark nights and uncertain mornings.

I am so grateful you’re here, mending with me.

With love and ink,
Hanan