A Soft Place to Land

be easy.
take your time. 
you are coming
home.
to yourself. 

— Nayyirah Waheed

April is National Poetry Month. I now look forward to it every year, but I don’t think I was aware that there was such a thing until sometime in the last decade. 

I started writing poetry when I was eight years old. I had a challenging childhood, and when life handed me things I didn’t know how to process or manage, I would pour them out onto the page. I tried lots of different kinds of writing. I kept a journal. I wrote stories. I may have even written a play at some point. But there was a freedom in poetry that I didn’t find anywhere else. 

Sometimes my poems rhymed, other times they didn’t. Sometimes they spanned pages of my notebook, other times they were a single sentence. When I learned about haikus, I spent weeks making meaning with the cadence of those three lines. 

As I got older, I wrote less, but I still took refuge in poetry. When I couldn’t find my own words to make meaning out of my experiences, I would find them in the works of others. Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Jericho Brown, Nayyirah Waheed, Alex Elle, Mahogany Browne, Ross Gay, and so many others have given voice again and again to things I felt but could not say. 

I am so grateful to poetry for giving me somewhere to land when it seemed like I had nowhere else to go. 

Satya Nelms
Associate Editor