Since it’s poetry month, we reached out to our friend (and BEx author) Tara-Elizabeth Downs with a simple challenge: recall the first time you fell in love with poetry. Here’s the brilliant response we got.
Falling in love with poetry was like having someone wait for me. Like waking up on a weekend morning with the kettle whistling through the house and the scent of peppermint saying “come put something warm inside you,” and we all already know the stories of warm things; they always introduce us to the right kind of ease in the moments we need it the most. Discovering poetry was like meeting an imaginary friend in real life and proving that they, too, have flesh and a beating heart inside them and they can stand at the edge of the doorway and smile at you while you brush your teeth. It was an extremely reassuring experience that something, with the ability to give me all the right kinds of home, lives inside me. It’ll always hold my hand to cross the street and it’ll always provide support for me to tell my danciest stories.
Follow Tara on Instagram and Twitter. Their new podcast called In Terms of What is now available on Spotify and Anchor. Sweet Thorns, Tara’s poetry collection, is available worldwide. Get it through the publisher or other retail outlets.
