7. Why I Chose Poetry Instead of Screaming
People sometimes ask why I write poetry.
It is a reasonable question.
Poetry is slow in a world that rewards speed.
It leaves space where other forms insist on explanations.
It rarely solves anything.
And yet, when I needed language the most, poetry was the only language that seemed capable of holding what I could not say.
Not because I chose it.
Because it found me.
There are experiences that resist ordinary sentences.
How do you explain the feeling of carrying fear into a room that has done nothing to deserve it?
How do you describe waking up exhausted before the day has even begun?
How do you tell someone what it feels like when memory refuses to remain in the past?
Prose can tell a story.
Poetry can hold a feeling.
Sometimes a feeling is all we have.
For a long time, I searched for the right words.
I believed that if I could explain myself clearly enough, perhaps someone would finally understand.
But pain does not always speak in paragraphs.
Sometimes it arrives in fragments.
A single image.
A single breath.
A single sentence that refuses to leave you alone.
Poetry welcomed those fragments.
It never demanded that they become complete before they deserved to exist.
I think that is one of the quiet miracles of the form.
A poem does not ask life to become orderly before it begins.
It simply meets life where it is.
Messy.
Contradictory.
Unfinished.
There were days when writing a single line felt like all I could manage.
Not because I had nothing else to say.
Because one honest sentence already carried more truth than I could bear.
Those sentences became poems almost by accident.
Not because I was trying to create literature.
Because I was trying to create enough space inside myself to keep breathing.
People often imagine that poetry is beautiful.
Sometimes it is.
But beauty has never been the reason I wrote.
Honesty was.
There are poems in my book that follow strict rhyme and careful structure.
Looking back, I realize I was trying to build order in a life that felt impossible to organize.
If I could not make sense of my world, perhaps I could at least make sense of a stanza.
Eventually, even those carefully built forms began to crack.
The poems became quieter.
Looser.
More willing to leave questions unanswered.
In many ways, they became more like life itself.
That is what writing taught me.
Not how to escape uncertainty.
But how to remain inside it without losing my voice.
Poetry did not replace conversation.
It did not replace treatment.
It did not remove grief, fear, or memory.
What it gave me was different.
It gave me a place where I no longer had to pretend that every feeling could be explained.
A place where silence itself could become part of the sentence.
Perhaps that is why I continue writing.
Not because every poem changes the world.
But because every honest poem changes the space between silence and language.
And sometimes, that small distance is enough to help another human being recognize themselves.
If someone reads a line and quietly thinks,
"I thought I was the only one."
Then the poem has already fulfilled its purpose.
Not by offering answers.
But by reminding two strangers that neither of them is standing alone.
People sometimes ask why I chose poetry.
The truth is…
I never chose poetry instead of screaming.
I chose poetry because it allowed me to whisper the things that screaming could never fully say.
And sometimes, a whisper can travel farther than a cry.
— Jean T. Hatoum
Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer
Thank you for giving my silence a place to land.
If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.
And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.
I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️
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