Poetry. The only soul medicine that I’ve seen really working is this. I’ve seen it in my life, I see it in other people every day.
Poetry heals, because it brings light to the darkest recesses of the soul. It saves, because it draws directly from the sources of Beauty. It makes us grow, because it forces us to walk towards ourselves.
But by doing good to ourselves we do good to all of humanity.
“the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse”
wrote the great Walt Whitman. Throwing ourselves into poetic logic we do our part. Beauty will save the world, wrote Dostoevsky. But he was wrong. Beauty is already saving it. And with poetry each of us can do their part.
Poetry can be read and written. But it’s actually the same thing. Those who write poems after having read so many is a bit as if they connect to a flow of words that comes from the first men. Who writes poetry is a wave that pushed by another wave goes to push a further wave.
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare can appear in every word we write. And whatever we write, actually, that has already been put into poetry by someone else.
That’s why to write a poem you have to read at least one hundred.
Poets are lone wolves howling at the moon. But they can howl all together. Then who knows, maybe the moon will look down on them and give the world a smile.
I see many of these smiles during the instagram lives in which I let people read their verses. It is a smile that unites mouths to mouths and makes those moments a huge smile together to the world.
In this era, people lost many of the tools they needed to understand reality. But no one can ever take away from them the power of poetic understanding.