Poetry seems to arrive just when we need it most. It first came to me when I was 31 years old, a new mother myself, I was helping to care for my own mother as she was losing her life to cancer. Having never written anything, something impelled me to write a poem for her, not a letter, but a simple poem. I have always wondered about how and why that happened.

Yet, it wasn’t until 20 years later that poetry fully revealed itself to me. I unexpectedly took a creative writing class, where I recognized all the little phrases I had been writing down were actually poetry starts. Suddenly I fell in love with something I knew almost nothing about.

And it happened that was also the year my husband moved out, the same year he was diagnosed with a cancer that would take his life. Quickly, poetry became my comfort, my companion, my scaffolding. Holding me up, getting me through difficult times.

As I Google searched ‘poetry events ’and slowly found them. I found my way to the book ‘Saved by a Poem’ and to Kim Rosen as a teacher. I studied for 5 years in her Poetry Depths Mystery School where she teaches the transformative power of poems especially as you learn them by heart. As I deeply learned certain poems by heart, I was indeed transformed. The poems got into the corners of my interior like nothing else had.

And year after year I found my way to workshops with so many of our amazing contemporary poets at Poetry at Round Top in Texas; Naomi Shihab Nye, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe and many more.

It is because poetry so deeply and profoundly changed me, I wanted to and have shared it with my family, and with friends. I have shared it with strangers on subways, at restaurants; daring to offer poem cards, speak poems by heart.

A few years ago I was influenced by Dorianne Laux to put a poem box at the end of my driveway. Each week I fill the box with 4x6 cards with one poem on them. In my quiet neighborhood only a handful of people pass by and pick up the poem so I began to email my Poem.Box.Poems each week. Sign up below if you would like to receive them. There are so many ways to be with poetry, so many ways to connect with poems. I hope we can meet and share in poetry soon.