I can’t remember not loving poems.

A little girl, I loved reciting rhymes, delighted with the rhythm and cadence and sheer joy in taking words in, memorizing them, and speaking them back into the world.

Poems have a shape, a form, even when they don’t follow any formal scheme. They are containers for memory, experience, grief, joy, story, or the lack of story.

Poems can thrum with electricity, crackle with surprise, or list with unease. Poems do everything prose does in a modicum of the space.

Poems meet you where you are. That’s what I love about them. Most folks believe that a poem must mean what the poet meant when she wrote it.

I don’t.

I believe the poet releases the poem to the world and it begins to breathe on its own. It finds a reader where she lives and it weaves its magic into her experience.

National Poetry Month will be over this weekend, so I thought I would link here to a few more of my favorite poems. I hope they feed you the way they feed me.

The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.