“What is poetry?” She didn’t seem to understand that this question was probably the most difficult one for me to answer. Nobody has ever asked me that, not until this little girl approached me while writing. As if the universe had handed her the right question at the precise moment.

Never had I bothered to give that word a proper definition. A meaning. It was something everyone carried in their souls and would recognise straight away.

Poetry was the love people felt when meeting that one and only person. It was the pain they felt with loss; the magic stuck in those small moments only the cleverest people could unravel. It was the wind in winter and the breeze in summer. The flowers blooming in spring, bringing everything back to life, and the leaves falling in autumn, leaving space for the cold to take over once more.

It also meant the sum of all emotions every person felt in their being; it was the happy moments when soul and body are in peace with each other. It was the bridge between the head and the heart; the feelings only you can sense.

Poetry becomes the umbrella you open in the rain, the window you close in the cold, the day just before sunset. It was the final breath in a long life, as well as the first in a very short one. The storm in the calmest sea and the rage in an otherwise unshaken man. The fall of the last leaf from the tree and the first bloom in a garden. 

That little girl knew very little about poetry, for poetry is only what people turn it into, and that is what makes such a beautiful creation. It was the words we use to make people feel, to tell a story few will understand and will reach the heart of all. Poetry was everything we told it to be. The soil, the rain, the sea… All of it.

Poetry is a thing that wasn’t meant to be answered, for it belonged to no one except to whom created it. It didn’t belong to writers as well nor did it belong to readers. It has only and will ever belong to the moments it holds. The shiver before a confession and the silence after a goodbye. It isn’t perfection nor clarity, for it is everything contained in a single word. It is something impossible to be captured by rules or determined by an exact definition.

With my gaze lifted towards the sky, simple words slipped from my lips towards the little girl, waiting with a kind of patience adults always forget to carry. Saying what only children would truly understand. “Poetry is anything you need it to be.”

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Texto por JULIA RESANO (1ºB BACH)
Ilustración por ANA TABARES (3ºB ESO)