Why I need to make time for poetry (and you should too)….

As the "to-do" list gets longer and the time left to do it in gets shorter, looking for poems to post quickly falls to the bottom of the list. It only makes sense when I’m working full time, studying for the GRE, waiting on pins and needles to see if I have a place to live in a few weeks, and leaving for a trip in a few days that the time to look up (forget reading and (gasp!) enjoying) poetry feels like a luxury. It’s something to be done when there’s nothing else to do and I’m just trying to kill time. I have my day timer right here and can confidently say I don't have time to even casually push in a corner, let alone kill. And with all this poem reading/ posting business being a self imposed project, I can’t help but wonder if anyone would even notice if I stopped all together. 

But then I have to remind myself of why I started this blog in the first place. It’s because too many people consider poetry (and often reading in general) a luxury.  When everything is falling apart, the last place we think to go is the bookshelf and maybe that’s the biggest mistake. To quote Maya Angelou, “When everything is falling apart, go to your knees and then go to the library.” It’s been said hundreds of times before (usually by people much smarter than me), but it's the shared experience of humanness, of happiness or tragedy, or just being captured in one or two lines of well written poetry that keeps us from feeling all alone.  It’s immediate access into a moment and into someone  else's experience. There’s a reason why people wrote and keep writing poems and why we keep reading them.  There’s a reason that why when nothing else in the world makes sense, sometimes the best thing to do is to take a moment alone to sit down with some hot tea and a good poem. I promise, it helps. So if you’re feeling like me today (just a little overwhelmed with living), together let’s take a breath, slow down, and make the time to enjoy an old favorite. And if we’re lucky, word by word (or if it’s a really bad day, letter by letter) we'll be able to look at another person's humanness and slowly make a little more sense of our own.