What Happens When the Poems Don’t Come
Notes on grief, language, and release
Poetry was one of my first languages.
I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember. I’ve written chapbooks, performed spoken word, and stood behind microphones reading my life into rooms full of people. Before I knew how to carry a thought through an essay, I knew how to put a feeling inside a line.
Poetry gives me somewhere to put things.
That’s why it scares me when the words don’t come.
When my grandma died in 2021, I decided I would never write again. I couldn’t understand how someone so broken could still have words. My life had been shattered, and writing required me to remember. How could I remember her that way when remembering hurt so much?
I didn’t know how to make language from the thing that had taken language from me.
There have been other moments when grief has made me wonder whether I’ll ever write again. The ideas don’t come. The words feel far away. I know creativity moves at its own pace, but that knowing doesn’t always comfort me. Writing has been one of the ways I’ve understood myself for most of my life. When I can’t reach it, I feel trapped.
There has to be a release.
Often times that release is prayer. Sometimes I collage, make something with my hands, or let myself rest until my body catches up with what I’ve been carrying. I sleep. I take a nap. Give myself permission to be still. And sometimes the release is a poem.
Lately, I’ve been in my poetry bag.
I have whole poems, unfinished poems, and pieces that fit together in different ways depending on how I arrange them. I’ve collected all of it, though I don’t know what it’s becoming yet.
Perhaps it’s a book. Maybe some of the poems belong in a zine, beside photographs, or inside a larger body of work I haven’t named. A few of them will never see the light of day just because I needed somewhere to place what I was feeling that day.
A poem might get me to the altar before a sermon does.
I’ve read poems that felt like prayers I didn’t know how to pray. They’ve made room for grief, doubt, praise, memory, and God without asking any of it to arrive neatly.
That’s part of what draws me to Lucille Clifton. She says what she came to say and trusts the words to carry the rest. Her poems leave room for a whole life without explaining it away.
Reading her has me thinking about the language that has carried me for most of my life.
What Lucille Clifton Taught Me About Celebration
Before Come Celebrate With Me had a shape, it had a phrase.
I still don’t know where the poems I’ve collected are going. I only know that I need them. I need the remembering, the listening, and the moment when something that has been sitting inside me finally finds its way onto the page.
Perhaps that’s the release I’ve been asking for.
A Few Poetry Books I Keep Close
I couldn’t write about poetry without sharing a few collections I love. This isn’t a complete list, just a few books I’ve returned to, underlined, carried around, or told somebody else they needed to read.
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans
I come back to this one all the time. Year after year, it still finds me. If you’ve ever had to think about home, your mother, your body, Black girlhood, or the parts of yourself you’re still trying to gather, start here.
Baby, this book has Detroit, church, Black womanhood, pleasure, family, class, and a whole lot of nerve in it. Brittany writes with so much life on the page. I love a book that knows exactly where it comes from.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire will have you sitting with a line long after you’ve closed the book. This collection is beautiful, painful, and full of memory. It says so much about girlhood, family, migration, and what the body keeps.
I Am the Rage by Dr. Martina McGowan
This is the book for when you’re angry and tired and need somebody to say the thing plainly. It gives language to the grief and rage that come with being Black in America.
Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker is sharp, funny, strange, smart, and not interested in making Black womanhood easy for anybody. This is the kind of collection that makes you stop, reread, and then sit there for a minute.
Vulnerable AF by Tarriona “Tank” Ball
You already know Tank can tell a story. These poems are honest about love, heartbreak, wanting, self-worth, and all the ways we can lose ourselves trying to make something work.
Anything Ntozake Shange touches feels alive. This collection carries beauty, grief, politics, womanhood, and the body with so much rhythm. You can hear the poems even when you’re reading them quietly.
I mean this exactly as written: anything by Maya Angelou. Pick up a collection and begin. She knew how to write with dignity, humor, faith, grief, and authority all at once. Her voice will meet you wherever you are.
Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.
And thank you, always, for being here.