The Power of Poetry

What is the power of my poetry?

I have been writing poetry since I was very young. I began using it to express how the popular girls made me feel. Inferior. Ugly. Never enough.

I wrote down the comebacks that I wish I had been smart enough to say when they were in my face making me feel like the dirt beneath their feet.

I felt empowered by my words, by the thoughts that I was able to put down on paper in my tiny little notebook that I had in my backpack that no one else would ever find. I was free to say what I wanted without the consequences of anyone’s response.

They could think whatever they wanted of me but I knew what they didn’t, that I was better, that I was more beautiful, that I was superior, that I had powers and energies that they knew nothing about. I used to read all the time, but now I was a writer.

When I was sexually assaulted when I was a teenager, I filled a journal with poems about my emotions, how I was angry, how scared I still, how I was surviving day after day.

When I was married the first time and we were struggling, I would stay up late at night and write about what I wished our marriage would be, that I remembered the good days, how I felt lost and how strong I knew I was, that I had already survived trauma and abuse and that I knew I could get through anything. My ex-husband would get offended and not understand why I couldn’t just write about how I loved him.

But it doesn’t work that way, my poetry. It has always been that friend that does not judge, does not interrupt, has no say, listens, and is available anytime I need it to be there.

It has been the only way I can make sense of what I’m dealing with how, to survive, to put words to feelings.

I write about relationships, after every break up I would fill pages and pages about what I was going through, if I would make it, if I had imagined the love, if it had never even existed. I could beat myself up or someone else. I’d place blame on myself and work through the problems until I was healed, until my cramped hand was ready to stop.

My mom once said why can’t you write about your love for me or a beautiful flower. But as I said before it doesn’t work that way for me. If I am happy, I am just happy. I live in the happiness, I bathe in the joy. I know nothing but the peace I feel. I experience elation, I feel centered. I pass by notebooks waiting to be written in but I apologize, having nothing for them. My hand does not itch to write what is in my heart.

I’ve tried to write about the good things, and I have succeeded, sure, a few times. But it is only when my heart is breaking, only when I am at that precipice, where I feel like I’m going to fall and not know where I will land, it is only then that poetry saves my life. Perhaps that is its sole purpose.

It is my best companion when I am lonelier than I have ever been. It is the most powerful presence in my life.

It is an extra limb that God did not realize that I would need, and so he gave me power in my brain that reaches through my fingertips to create the perfect combination of words that allow me to breathe.

It lets me see clearly, like the first sunny day after a storm, like how it feels to finally cry when you’ve been holding it in all day, how the ground smells when the flowers are about to break through the first day of spring, how children feel after the anticipation of Christmas morning and all the gifts have been opened.

Poetry is my peace, is my relief, is my breath, is my life.