National Poetry Month

Living gratefully today, I appreciate how poetry saved me from my active alcoholic self and how it now continues to help me find my true self that I can bury under overthinking and overdoing. It was telling when I used this line at age 16: “I found alcohol before I found me.”

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also personal poetry month and sister poetry month. I have written hundreds and thousands of poems, but it is still new for me to challenge myself to a poem-a-day for a month. I did it two years ago, just as the pandemic was revving up and life was getting very strange. My six surviving sisters joined me, and we ended up with enough material to create and publish our first book— April in Pieces: Seven Sisters Writing on COVID and Cancer. April as National Poetry Month was the spark that led to the dream of a published book becoming a reality.

Here we are in a new April, not post-pandemic—but something better than the high levels of fear and uncertainty we faced in April 2020. Regarding COVID-19 anyway. Our collective energy was zapped, and my own was zapped following surgery late last August. So here we are, jumpstarting the practice and the collaboration.

There will be several of my poems in this batch that will never be finished. Others that will only be seen by me and the pages of my journal. But there will be others, like the one below, that will be shared to a wider audience and perhaps resonate with readers:

Tried and True

left, right

left, right

stride by stride

mile for mile

arms churning

legs pumping

mind opening

heart beating

tried and true

my road to peace,

creativity and sanity

is paved by

every run I take

LV 4/9/22

We all have poems inside of us. I believe this. Have you found any of yours? Put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. See what emerges. You might just surprise yourself.