I started writing poems when I was seven.  I had already compiled an anthology of my favorite poems, a gift to my mother for mother’s day.  Writing my own preoccupied me, taking precedence over assigned school work, and by junior high, poems became my number one way to communicate my disgust for my fellow students and fear of the world.  My mother gave her deceased brother’s well-read poetry book, and I was even more in love, memorizing all the roots in the eyes of a dead poet and crying over the war death of the Trees author.

But who noticed?  In high school, I appeared to be the only poem-read person among my friends, and my father, a World War II vet with a high school education, was afraid to have me go to college, let alone major in English.  As a campus electrician, he saw what those college students did with their time—Frisbee playing in the cemetery, drinking binges, and worst of all, arrests by non students.  College seemed like a dead end to my dad, especially because I didn’t learn to type (I took German as my third language instead).  So, I majored in business at my guidance counselor’s recommendation, and never transferred to English as she suggested.  I graduated to a corporate leadership training program, and my business career was off and running, with my dad joyfully cutting out my promotion announcements in the local paper.

But you can’t deny your true self for long.  When I was laid off from the bank, I told my parents I wanted to write poetry.  “Poetry?  Poetry?  Does the world need poetry?”  My mother wrinkled her face up as she asked.  I felt my heart drop to the floor.  And in a way, she was right.  Many years had passed since I had tried to write a poem.  I later stretched into bigger pieces of work, eventually writing drafts of multiple novels.  The small, sometimes delicate, pieces seemed too difficult.

Today, poetry sits in my face again.  First, a darling writer friend of mine is in a poetry contest.   Because I see her drafts, I realize how amazing her word choices are, and then she rewrites it, and makes a great poem even better.  The contest leads me to reading dozens of poems of others too.  I’m reverting back to my addiction.

Then I attend a funeral of a simple elderly country woman who lived with hunting dogs in her backyard and homemade root beer in her fridge.  At her service, a poem is read, written by her long deceased farmer father for the death of his mother.  It is a beautiful poem of loss, love, and appreciation, and on the back cover of the program is a poem written by the recently dead woman herself, about dying, and waiting for her six children to visit.

That night, at a community talent show, a nine year old boy, for his talent, recites three poems.  He receives thunderous applause from over four hundred listeners.

How many more signs do I need to let Poetry back into my life?  So, while there are many online tools now for word searches, I begin back into it by grabbing the thesaurus my mother gave me as an apology for her discouragement.  Yes, the world does need poetry after all.