How Poetry Became My Portal to Abundance

There was a time I believed abundance was a matter of numbers—money in the bank, followers on a screen, invitations to rooms filled with important people. I chased it. I ran breathless toward it. And for years, I came up empty.

It wasn’t until I stopped running and started writing that I discovered the true nature of abundance. Not loud. Not obvious. Not fast. But soft. Quiet. Intentional. Like a poem whispered to yourself before sunrise.

I began writing poetry during a winter that cracked me open.

It was the kind of season that coats everything in silence. I was newly divorced, living in a small apartment with walls thin enough to hear the coughs of my neighbor’s toddler and the muffled arguments from the unit below. The days felt heavy, gray. I couldn’t remember what joy looked like. My job in corporate marketing paid the bills but drained me in ways that even weekends couldn’t repair.

One evening, I found an old notebook while unpacking a forgotten box. It had lilac flowers on the cover, and the first page held a poem I wrote when I was twelve:

“The stars don’t speak,

but I think they see me.”

I cried. Not because it was profound, but because it reminded me that once—long ago—I believed that silence could be sacred.

That night, I wrote again.

Not for anyone else. Not for likes or claps or gold stars. I wrote because I needed to feel something. I needed a place to lay down my heartache without it being judged or edited. I wrote poems that didn’t rhyme, poems that started mid-sentence, poems that ended with ellipses and unspoken hopes.

I wrote until the page stopped feeling like paper and started feeling like home.

Soon, I made it a ritual.

Every morning before emails, before the rush, I wrote three lines. That was the rule. Even if they were terrible. Even if they didn’t make sense. Three lines before the world got loud.

Sometimes it was:

“The coffee doesn’t listen,

but it never leaves.

That’s enough today.”

Other times it was:

“If grief is a tide,

then love must be the moon.

And I, the sea.”

These small poems became my mirror. My map. My medicine.

A few months in, something shifted. My world didn’t change, but how I saw it did.

The rain didn’t feel as heavy when I imagined it as the sky crying with me. The loneliness didn’t feel as cruel when I gave it a name and a stanza. Even boredom became a muse. Poetry didn’t solve my problems—it transformed my relationship with them.

Abundance, I realized, wasn’t about more. It was about meaning.

And poetry gave everything meaning.

The more I wrote, the more I saw.

A sprig of rosemary on my windowsill became a poem. A stranger’s smile at the bus stop became a story. My cracked coffee mug held metaphors. Every object, every moment, pulsed with poetry. And in that seeing, I felt full—rich even.

Eventually, I shared a few poems online. Not for recognition, but connection. The responses trickled in gently:

“I feel seen.”

“You put my feelings into words.”

“This helped me breathe.”

It was then I understood: abundance also meant giving.

Poetry opened doors I didn’t expect.

An independent publisher reached out after seeing my work on Instagram. Six months later, I held my first chapbook in my hands. “Light Between the Lines,” we called it. I remember the trembling in my fingertips as I signed my first copy. Not because I had “made it”—but because I had finally heard myself.

Now, I teach workshops. I mentor young poets. I host tiny readings in libraries and parks and Zoom rooms. Every time someone shares their verse, I see that same sparkle I once had, tucked into a childhood poem about stars.

If you asked me five years ago what abundance meant, I might’ve shown you a spreadsheet.

Now? I’d show you a notebook—creased, coffee-stained, filled with ink and silence and soul.

Because poetry became my portal to abundance.

Not in dollars. Not in fame.

But in depth. In presence. In the quiet joy of being fully, fiercely alive.

Story by shohel rana