Letters To Autumn (2016)

6

Dear Autumn, 

It's National Poetry Day. To be honest, I wasn't much into poetry a few years ago. I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't actively choose to read it, and writing it was out of the question. Maybe not entirely out of the question, but on the sidelines of the question, sometimes coming into full but fading out again. If I did write poetry, it was never personal. I never dug out the anger and anxiety and attached it to concrete words. In fact, I think one of the first poems I ever wrote was about you, Autumn, when I was ten years old. I still have it somewhere, in a stack of composition books I can't seem to throw out. It would feel like throwing out myself. Throwing out memories, chunks of my life. 

Today I reread one of my favorite poetry books, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. Anyone who is friends with me probably knows I never stop talking about this book, but the thing is this book never stops talking to me. I find my mind wandering to certain quotes from it, strings of words that cut into me and took my breath away, lines that made me look up and stare at the wall for a long while.

How do people have that inside them? The power to take words we use everyday and tie them together in a way that means everything? I guess that's poetry. 

You're my favorite poem, Autumn.