One summer I was at lowest ebb with a family member, feeling that I could not go on, not knowing how to tolerate or change the situation, feeling deep despair. At that very moment, I received, by what means I cannot say, the poem “Divorce,” by José A. Alcántara. This poem does not speak of divorce, nor of the wounded bird, nor the ‘you’ he addresses, and yet, it describes heartbreak and vulnerability, tender care, and ultimately, resilience. I learned  this poem by heart, changing the masculine pronouns to the feminine because I felt myself to be both the bird and the speaker. It helped me to have compassion for myself in my grief and gave me comfort until I recovered my strength to go on. This is both the magic and the medicine of poetry.

Poetry played a background role in my early life, from children’s verses to high school projects, but it came to the foreground with unexpected force in my late 50s when I heard David Whyte reciting Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” in a recording while I was driving. I had to pull over to re-listen to the lines “You will love again the stranger who was your self…who has loved you / all your life, whom you ignored / for another, who knows you by heart” and to stem my tears of recognition. This pivotal moment moved me to seek out more such poetic wisdom. 

Then in 2011, I encountered Kim Rosen’s book Saved By a Poem, and later her workshops and Poetry Depths Mystery School where I studied for several years with her, learning the  transformative power of poetry especially when set to music. This was a world in which I found that poetic language could express what was so difficult to put into words myself – providing a vast store of poems from ancient to contemporary, many of which I learned by heart. It was also a defining moment to realize that poetry was the form my own writing had been seeking all my life.  

I was truly saved by many poems, experiencing first-hand that poetry is strong medicine. It has therapeutic powers, giving form to feelings and emotions when we don’t know how to express ourselves. Such poems become personal, understandable, meaningful; they can comfort or challenge us as we need. These are the poems we can carry with us for life, touchstones as we make our way.

Such poems are also meant to be given away, prescribed for acute situations, or received like daily supplements. With that in mind, I began a personal collection of my favorites and in 2015 created a blog, Heart Poems, where I share how the poem I have chosen affects me. In my experience, a poem that  resonates is like my breath, a focal point in the chaos of the day that gently holds me in the here and now.

In 2020, with the distress of the pandemic, I moved from monthly to weekly  posts, always seeking poems to remind us of the possibilities of beauty and joy and connection despite global chaos. This is a labor of love, and I am always touched to hear that a poem arrived for someone at just the right moment when those particular words were needed.

Poetry has gracefully braided two important aspects of my work as a psychotherapist – mindfulness and grief. There is a presence in poems that invites us to pay attention, to stop, breathe, focus. It is there that we can be mindful of the life we are living, that we can come home  to ourselves, if only for a moment. My clients are no longer surprised when I quote a few lines appropriate to the moment or offer a whole poem to take away with them. 

As for grief, there’s a world of poetry that can companion us, help us to feel understood, show us the poet has found a way to live with their own sorrow. This is where I feel  poetry’s most potent medicine can be found. I strongly hold the belief that loss and death are an important part of living a full, meaningful life –not something to be avoided. More than simply expressing inexpressible grief, these poems also, inevitably, remind us of the beauty and  joy to be found along with the depths of our sadness. 

These days, part of a meaningful life for me very much includes poetry – reading, writing,  speaking, sharing it. Poems are a subjective experience which will hold different meaning for each person who encounters it, but what matters is our personal response to it. Poetry brings  beauty and light to a dark time, reminds us of the inherent goodness of humans in contrast to  the cruelty and horror delivered in the daily news, a reminder of what is important, a necessary  consolation. To quote William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems / yet  men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”