Today I am thankful for poetry. For most of my life I have been a lover and a writer of poetry. Now, I do not write poetry nearly as much as I used to for various reasons, mainly the fact that I really do not have a whole lot of free time nowadays. However, there are times when something or someone will inspire me to write and in those moments I usually make it a point to dedicate some time to write when the inspiration hits.
When I was a teenager and even during my early years of college, I used to try to fit the various inspirational ideas that came to me into poems with fixed forms (haikus, sonnets, or any other type of poem that has a set form). As I studied poetry in college, I learned about a variety of types of poems and the importance of them all. I also quickly learned that the inspirational thoughts that came to me generally did not lend themselves to the type of fixed-form types of poems that I was studying. And needless to say that took a little bit of the air out of my balloon. Eventually, though, I started writing poetry for personal reasons again, rather than just for school, and I eventually came to the realization that I could write poems that did not adhere to any specific form, that I could write poems that were reflective of who I was instead of trying to force my thoughts to adhere to a specific form. And that is what I started doing.
That decision was one of the best decisions that I have ever made. With poetry being one of the few avenues that I use to really express who I am without restrictions, that decision not only liberated my poetry, it liberated me too, making it that much easier for me to express myself even more freely and honestly. And now that I look back on it, I do believe that I fell in love with poetry all over again through that experience. #lovebythedrop
love by the drop 