Poetry saves my life daily. Whether writing or reading it, I find that poems capture the experience of life in a way that our everyday sentences and conversations cannot.

When I’m going through challenging periods, poems soothe my spirit and give me strength. I’ll carry a book of poems in my bag to read throughout the day. The softness of the particular way poetry explores and articulates experience speaks to a deeper part of me.

This week, the book of poems in my bag was Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early, which is full of so much beauty. Her words in the poem “The Old Poets of China” about the world offering her its busyness not believing that she doesn’t want it, struck a chord with me. Oliver’s poems celebrate the beauty of the natural world—I read them and I am transported far from my crowded subway car to a place where I’m inside the poem with her, considering the patience and faith of the lily or staring up into the face of a bronze-shouldered owl. Poems are necessary.

In “Sister Outsider: essays and speeches” Audre Lorde says,

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

She says that through poetry, we “help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Poetry helps us to know and accept feelings hidden deep within, which then gives rise to inspired, informed action in our lives.

In this way poetry is a potent kind of “practical magic” that keeps us in touch with ourselves, hearing the movements of our spirit that we might not have uncovered otherwise. If we have the courage to let ourselves write the poems and then pay attention to what they tell us, that is.

Poetry is a vital part of my daily life now. I write poems, I carry other people’s poems. Sometimes I dream poems. Poems are also, as Audre Lorde said, directing me to “tangible action” as I listen to the messages in the ones I write.

I can accomplish almost anything with the right poem in my heart.

Below is a poem of my own that has been a talisman for me lately. I pray that you find—or have the courage to let yourself write—the poem you need, the poem that will surely guide you forward. xo

Life Cycle of Stars and Women

by Tiffany Nicole Fletcher

Don’t listen when they try to tell you
that your glory must look like sacrifice.
There was only one and you are not Him
You are here now to go beyond,
To be free,
To walk light
To explore belonging to yourself
first
To be foremost your own
And to know joy.

You will give what you are—
Give your children your
love your joy your heart your freedom your hope your being sure of inherent worth your divinity your spirit your light
your neverendingness,
your eternal heart.

You must keep going
you must die you must come to the end of yourself
you must locate your freedom and hold on
you must let yourself be remade.

You must know yourself as you were on the first day and still are:
innocent, free of what they have done, stripped of any regret,
new
and timeless,
starlight burning off the excess with every breath—
constantly healing, regenerative beauty,
formed by God for this time—
for right where you are,
nothing a mistake.

image: Freestocks.org/Stocksnap