Poems Are Not for Children

Someone told me once that poetry is for school. That it lives between September and June in a textbook with wide margins where teenagers write I don't get this in pencil. But I found poetry at thirty-four, in a hospital waiting room, on a Tuesday, in a book someone left on a chair. The poem was about a plum. Just a plum. Cold, sweet, stolen from the icebox. And I cried. Not because of the plum. Because someone had taken the smallest thing— the most ordinary, forgettable, unimportant thing— and made it worth writing down. And I thought: if a plum can be worth this, maybe the rest of it can too. Maybe my morning. Maybe my grief. Maybe the way my daughter said something yesterday that I've already forgotten but haven't forgotten how it made me feel. Poetry is not for children. It's for the adults who forgot that the world is still worth paying attention to. It's for the ones who stopped reading because they were too busy living and then realized that living without reading is just surviving with better furniture. Open the book. Any book. Read the first line. If it doesn't grab you, turn the page. Sooner or later you'll find the plum that was meant for you.