childrens poetry
Nostalgia-inducing poetry inspired by our earliest favorites; from Dr. Seuss to Mother Goose, children’s poetry is all grown up.
The Poetry of Us: Understanding Human Behavior Through a Poet’s Eyes
On a quiet park bench in the early blush of spring, an old poet named Elia watched the world unfold like a verse. Her fingers, long stained with ink and seasons, curled gently around a small leather-bound notebook. In it, she didn’t write about the stars or the sea anymore. She wrote about people. The way they laughed too loud to hide sorrow, how their hands twitched when they lied, how they leaned into one another without noticing. To Elia, human behavior was poetry in motion—chaotic, imperfect, but undeniably artful. Each morning, she came to the same spot, just beneath a flowering dogwood tree, and observed. She never judged. She simply noticed. Today, a boy no older than ten sat across from her, furiously kicking a pinecone down the path. His brows were stitched in frustration, but when his little sister toddled over, wobbling like a windblown dandelion, his face softened. Without a word, he picked up the pinecone and handed it to her like a treasure. Elia wrote one line: Anger melts quickest in the hands of innocence. She had learned over the years that emotions weren’t linear. They looped and danced and collided. People said things they didn’t mean when fear took hold. They apologized not always with words but with coffee left on a desk, or a blanket pulled up higher over a shoulder in the night. Her neighbor, Miriam, for instance, had never spoken about her husband who left. But every morning, she tended to her wilting geraniums with the kind of care reserved for things you’ve lost once and fear losing again. That, Elia thought, was love too—quiet, bruised, but persistent. One afternoon, a teenager slumped beside her on the bench, headphones in, eyes scanning a cracked phone screen. He sighed, deep and theatrical. Elia didn’t speak. Eventually, he did. “People suck.” She smiled gently. “Some do. But most are just scared.” He looked at her sideways. “Scared of what?” “Of being misunderstood. Of needing too much. Of being too much.” He stared ahead for a moment. “Yeah. That sounds about right.” He came back the next day. And the next. He didn’t always talk, but when he did, he told her about the fight with his dad, the pressure at school, the way he missed his mom even though she was technically still around. Elia didn’t offer advice. She offered lines. “One day you’ll see that silence isn’t always emptiness,” she said once. “Sometimes it’s just a space waiting to be heard.” He wrote that down in his Notes app. As the seasons turned, Elia filled her notebook with these small human truths. Not grand theories or psychological models, just moments. A woman stroking the collar of her absent dog’s leash. A couple arguing with their backs still touching. A man rehearsing a proposal alone under the stars. She noticed how we seek rhythm—in relationships, in daily rituals, in the repeated patterns of hurt and healing. We chase comfort in the familiar, even when it wounds us. And yet, we are also capable of great rewritings. She once saw a man return every Sunday to the same tree, laying a single white lily on the ground. For months, he never missed a week. Then one day, he came with a woman by his side. They laid the lily together. When they walked away, they held hands. Elia wrote: Grief does not leave us; it makes room. Over time, people began to know her. Not in the way they knew friends, but in the way one knows a steady landmark—the lighthouse in the fog. They nodded, offered her pieces of their lives, small and broken and beautiful. A thank-you letter never sent. A fear confessed. A poem scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt. And Elia collected it all—not to fix them, not to diagnose—but to understand. To witness. Because to her, the poetry of us was not in the perfection of our actions but in the way we tried. The way we failed and forgave. The way we yearned to be seen and held, even when we didn’t know how to ask. In her final days, the boy with the pinecone, the teenager with the heavy sighs, the grieving man and the couple, they all returned—one by one. They sat by her side and read aloud from her notebook. Her words, born from their lives, looped back to them. In her final entry, scrawled in slightly shaking hands, Elia wrote: We are stories pretending to be skin. We are verses still unfinished. We are the poetry of us. And then she rested. And still, beneath the flowering dogwood, the bench waits. For someone else to notice.
By Muhammad Saad 5 months ago in Poets
The Taste of Lies
The Taste of Lies “Bitter words linger longer than sweet ones, and some truths never wash away.” Lila always believed that honesty was like sugar—sweet, comforting, and easily savored. But over the years, she learned the other taste of the world: lies.
By waseem khan5 months ago in Poets
