Poetry Pals - Week 12 - Ars Poetica - exploring why we write poems

Just one this week.

Hello peeps,

This week over at

Poetry Pals

Nelly had us looking at and thinking about why we write.

Then gave us our task…

… tell me, how has poetry got you?

Why do you weave your words?

I have written about property a few times. I began writing for myself at around 13 (post here) as a means to express what I was feeling as a teenaged adolescent entering puberty in a household where I felt I couldn’t talk to my parents or siblings and I had no real friends at school. Writing became my friend. I kept a diary, now burnt by an all consuming funeral pyre for my ancient words. I had just been diagnosed with ME/CFS and the thought of my impending demise worried me and I didn’t want my children to read what was in there. 15 years later I do regret it a bit. I did transcribe some of it but not much.

Poetry has helped me many, many times. And many times the words have fallen silent. When I’ve struggled with brain fog and could barely string a simple sentence together poetry was furthest from my mind. Surviving took all my strength. Years went by in barren wastes. Occasionally something would stir me so much that I was forced to write. A poem every couple of years, occasionally a brief flurry of 3 or 4 poems and then back to that barren land again. Many poems only half written before I threw them away because I just could not remember what I was doing, what the words wanted, how I was meant to tell their story; they abandoned me. And it really felt like abandonment. At one point, in an uncharacteristic time of brain energy where I’d been writing again, I lost 30,000 words in a computer glitch. 30,000! I was bereft. And don’t write for a long, long time after.

Writing makes me feel alive. Makes me feel like I matter. In a world where the disabled, the old, the neurodivergent, and women, are dismissed it makes me feel I belong. I have a voice, I have meaning, I am accepted for purely being me. No masks (sadly not completely true as I don’t post some poems for fear of being judged or offending), just almost pure unadulterated me. And that’s what I want. To be seen, not squashed, not made small, not belittled, but seen and accepted for just being me.

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Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

What I Want

I want to be seen.
Not the dumpy aging shell I inhabit.
Not the wrinkles, the grey, the deteriorating physical being. 
Not this corporeal outer that others judge without thinking.
I want my inner self to be found and cherished,
The one I hide away, tucked into the corners of my mind.
The small me-child sitting in my mind-library consuming 
book after book after book, living on words. 
I want her to come out and play. 
 
I want to be heard.
Deeply heard, heard and understood.
The words I can’t articulate verbally, that stick in my throat,
The words that pester me daily, hourly, minutely; constantly. 
The words that clog my thinking needing release. 
They are in my head continually and I need to get them out. 
Released into the world where they can grow and thrive, 
Meanings given and taken, insight shown.
I want a voice.

I want to be understood.
To know I am speaking a truth,
A personal truth that maybe no one else has expressed so succinctly, 
A truth that brings tears of sorrow and joy, flutters of fear,
Of knowing insight and precision of perception.
And knowing we share the same vision, the same scene
From my brain to yours, in pure glorious cinematic clarity
Through my words alone I bond.
I want to be known. 

I want to be felt.
Not physically, but my soul touching other souls, 
I want to be felt by others, tentatively, gently, linked to them.
I want them to feel what I feel and gain understanding.
I want to give them a measure of my soul
And for them to cherish it, with the words that accompany it.
I want shared emotions, all of them. From icky love to horrific hate,
Empathetic to the last, I crave connection and
I want to be loved.
                                 April 2024

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It’s not finished or polished as I ran out of time. I’ll come back to it eventually and work out those glitches.

So there you go. I’m looking forward to the next task. Until next week.

If you have enjoyed my ramblings I’d love for you to click the ❤️. It pleases the social algorithm, lets others know there’s something interesting here, as well as letting me know you liked it and giving me a little virtual hug. Without virtual hugs I have been know to get sad 😜. Shares are good too and a comment buoys me up even more 😁 A comment of what you liked, what you didn’t etc would be most gratefully appreciated.