I wandered into a bookstore and was humbled.
I wandered into a library and was humbled.
I wandered through a church sale, a tag sale, a bent old barn with paperbacks stacked
beside chipped china and winter coats, and I was humbled.
Everywhere words.
Stacks of them, towers of them, whole civilizations of them.
Words from the dead.
Words from the brilliant.
Words from those who wrote so beautifully the pages blushed beneath their hands.
And I stood there holding some stranger’s forgotten novel, some poet’s perfect line, and thought:
Why should I add more?
What arrogance to believe the world needs another poem.
What audacity to place my small trembling words beside giants.
Surely all that could be said has been said better, cleaner, by wiser mouths than mine.
Who needs another page of longing?
Another stanza of grief?
Another woman trying to make sense of love, of politics, of God, of the strange persistence of hope?
And then between shelves heavy with masterpieces
and bargain bins of abandoned memoirs
a little girl wandered past me singing.
Not a song anyone had taught her.
Not polished.
Not marketable.
Not fit for critics.
She sang nonsense and sunlight.
She sang made-up rivers of language.
She sang to no audience at all but the holy air around her.
And the books did not mock her.
The poets did not rise from their graves in protest.
No librarian silenced her small wild hymn.
She sang because she was alive.
And I knew then: Every person is born carrying a song.
Some write theirs in notebooks at midnight.
Some paint onto walls.
Some dance them barefoot in kitchens.
Some speak sermons.
Some bury it in factories and office buildings.
Some swallow it whole.
Some sing.
Some write.
Some weep.
Some kiss recklessly.
Some raise children with exhausted tenderness.
Some march in streets carrying signs.
Some punch walls because rage arrived before language did.
And still it is poetry.
All of it.
The magnificent and the messy.
The sonnet and the scream.
The lullaby and the protest chant.
The whispered prayer over hospital beds.
The laugh that escapes at funerals.
The old man feeding birds in winter.
The drag queen in sequins lip-syncing survival.
The mother working two jobs and humming in her car before going inside.
Let every soul be heard.
Read your poems aloud with your hands shaking.
Sing off-key.
Write terrible first drafts.
Tell the truth at open mics.
Scrawl your heartbreak on napkins.
Speak your joy before the world convinces you to be quiet.
There is enough silence already.
Your words are not too small.
Your song is not too strange.
You are a human voice in the great unruly choir of the living,
and what a sacred thing it is
to open your mouth
and sing your song back.