"How have you experienced the healing power of poetry?"
I believe that poetry has many hidden/unknown healing properties that are more powerful than most people acknowledge. Just like running, singing, or painting, poetry has the ability to transform people's lives but the thing about poetry is that you don't need to write it to feel this. You can be an avid listener of poetry or someone who's never picked up a poem before and still feel something within yourself.
Before the Covid pandemic I never could've been able to answer someone who asked me how poetry has healed me. I suppose Covid is kind of me and poetry's origin story. You see, when Covid started spreading and everyone was quarantined I had no idea what to do with myself. Just like pretty much everyone else I was stuck at home 24/7 with little to no social interaction with anyone but my mother. I love my mother with all of my heart but I was going insane and during this time my depression was worse than ever. Something I don't tell a lot of people is that I was considering suicide at this time as well. I never expected anything to improve in my life and I thought that it was the end. What was there to live for then? What I didn't know is that one poet's work would not only help save my life but change it forever. This poet is the famous and furious Emily Dickinson.
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who's work was widely misunderstood and underrated during her lifetime. Her poems about death and women's place in society at that time inspired me to keep living and to use a pen as a sword and words as a lifeline. I wrote over 500 poems in a 3 month span during the pandemic, many of which I now hate or cry over because they portray a sad girl who was truly lost. But that's still me. I'm still lost but poetry is my calling and my motivation to live another day. I live knowing that throughout my time on earth people will hate my work, love my work, but maybe live and fight because of my work. That's truly liberating. The thing I want to emphasize the most is that as poets a lot of times we're expected to fight wars silently. But that's the thing that's truly freeing, we don't need to.
We can and do fight loudly every time we write down words on a page. All around us are people starting wars because of greed and jealousy but we're the one's trying to end the wars. To make sense of the wars and to inspire others to choose how they want to fight. That's the past, present, and future poet. As a beginner poet, a current student, and always a conflicted person I have no idea where I'm going to go or where my poetry will go either. I know that in the end all I can do is continue to inspire the world one word at a time and always remember that girl who almost let her life go before finding something within nothing.
Hayden Kasal-Barsky is a nineteen year old poet currently attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Hayden loves caring for children, making a difference in the world and being surrounded by animals big and small but poetry is her biggest passion. Hayden is a fairly new poet but is having 5 poems included in two different anthologies soon as well as getting her own short anthology published. In her free time Hayden's always submitting poetry to contests and anthologies. Hayden doesn't know where her words will take her but hopes that she can be a poet the rest of her life and dreams of becoming poet Laureate of America one day. She hopes that her poetry glimmers with flaw and brings light to her conflicted personality.
Instagram: @hayden.officiall
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