"Forgetting Your Brokenness Through Poetry" by Soo Young Lee
Winter is like a love song to me. I revel in the early darkness, overcast skies, rain and snow in beautiful combination. My toddler and I celebrate the night by riding sea saws and swings in the moonlight.
This winter, however, has been dimmed by the colds and coughs that have traveled back and forth in the family. Unable to explore or jump in puddles, our world shrank into the confines of our tiny apartment.
When I was finally given a day alone to sit on my couch with a cup of jasmine tea and book of poetry, I felt a rift inside start to mend. A few weeks of only tending to the healing of others and myself took its toll on me.
Thankfully, there is a remedy for me through poetry. Poetry creates breakthroughs. I read poetry when I have writer’s, emotional and life blocks to find my window in my “sky-house.” I sometimes make collages in dedication, sing their beats and dance to their stories. In Colorado, I was in a poetry group where we read the same poem over and over in unison and harmony to digest them like magical fruit.
As a professor and seminar leader, I have seen the transformation of faces just from hearing lines read aloud. Sleepy, apathetic students straighten their posture and listen with heads slightly crooked. Tears appear and gasps are unearthed through poetry. And this is just the beginning to what poetry can do.
Reading poetry is a reminder of one’s childhood that sits dormant inside everyone. It helps us remember to dialogue aloud, hear the trees talking and daydream that clouds can be walked on.
They can remind us of love, all the myriad of past moments – the first moments your hand was held by a new romantic interest, the first time you saw the ocean together after a summer day of biking, the way he watched you running into the waves. The pizza you cut out into a heart filling your lactose intolerant belly with extra crust and cheese.
That is what poetry is. It is the shavings around the centerpiece of life.
It is the fragments of a feeling that once felt so far. The colored pencil shavings a toddler creates in a ceramic blue bowl. Far more interesting than the pencils he started with. It is allowing one’s mind and emotions to stray and wander without a set course.
Whether read aloud or in a group, poetry demands quiet and seclusion. As soon as the first lines are read, each person has gone inward into their imaginings. The lines “Also, your presence, Our touching, our stories” may help listeners unfold different situations. Someone may recall how warm New York City felt that winter because she had leaped into the arms of an old pen pal who became the love of her life. Another may recall spring blossoms flying by, while skateboarding along the Charles River in Boston with his lover.
It is in these moments that poetry takes us, changes the space around us and fills it with potential. Anyone can become part of the poem as we add our own shards and petals of memories unfurled from an image or line.
“Everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness.”
Poetry can do all this because poetry holds everything. And in that everything, I can find myself again. We all can. In my workshops, we walk that forged path together to forget our brokenness and transform it into reclamation.
