One of my lifelong tendencies is the impulse to fix things. As the eldest in my family, I grew up stepping in when things fell apart. If someone was sad, I tried to cheer them up. If something broke, I did my best to repair it. If someone was struggling, I carried their pain like it was my own responsibility. This habit, born from care, has cost me many sleepless nights and perhaps a few early wrinkles. It has also taught me, slowly and sometimes painfully, the difference between helping and holding.
Poetry has been one of my greatest teachers in this regard.
What I love about poetry is that it doesn’t try to fix anything. It doesn’t rush to resolve or repair. Instead, it invites us to sit with what is…to feel deeply, to listen carefully, and to notice the beauty in imperfection and ambiguity. Poetry allows us to say much with few words. Its rhythm and rhyme carry meaning in a way that feels gentle, not didactic. A poem doesn’t lecture or prescribe; it simply is. And in that being, it teaches presence.
Even as a child, I think I knew this on some level. One of my favorite Christmas gifts, given to me in junior high by siblings who pooled their allowances, was a thick anthology: The Best-Loved Poems of the English Language. Hundreds of pages, filled with voices from across centuries. I remember curling up with that book for hours, placing tiny hearts or rabbit ears next to the poems I loved most. Those poems became my secret sanctuary, a place where I didn’t have to fix anything or be strong for anyone. I could simply be.
It was in those quiet, solitary moments – reading Shelley, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, and others – that I began to learn the sacredness of stillness. The power of presence. The quiet force of saying so much with so little. Poetry’s rhythm, like music, lives in breath and space. But unlike a song, its rhythm rises not from instruments but from the dance of vowels and consonants, the deliberate spacing of silence and sound.
And that is where I found salvation.
Not in solutions.
But in stillness.
These poems became guides, not by giving answers, but by teaching me how to hold space, for others, and for myself. In a world obsessed with fixing, poetry showed me the wisdom of simply showing up, of listening deeply, and of trusting that presence, in itself, is often enough. Here is poem to honor with everlasting beauty of poetry.
Ode to Poetry
O quiet flame that does not burn, but glows,
You teach us how to sit with what won’t heal.
Not with commands, nor cure, nor forceful prose—
But tender lines that help the soul to feel.
You do not rush to mend the broken part,
You hold it softly, word against the heart.
When sorrow comes, you do not turn away.
You speak in rhythm what we cannot name.
You let the silence in between words stay,
And honor grief without a need for blame.
No answers offered—just a place to be,
A breath, a pause, a thread of clarity.
Since childhood, I have followed where you lead,
A voice that steadied me when life was loud.
In poems, I found what weary hearts most need:
Not fixing, but a space to stand unbowed.
O verse, O balm, O teacher without plea—
You showed me how to hold, not rescue, me.