Share a poem that changed something for you: your desert island verse

[BankHolidayBlues87]

Not your favourite poem necessarily, though it might be the same thing. The poem that when you first read it, something shifted. Either in how you read poetry after that, or in how you understood something about yourself, or just in a way that is hard to name precisely but unmistakable.

I am curious about the variety here. Poetry functions differently for different people and the poem that cracked something open for one person can leave another completely cold. That range is part of what I love about this form.

Include as much context as you want about when you encountered it and what it did. The story of reading a poem is sometimes as interesting as the poem itself.

[Di46]

Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse. I was 17 and it articulated something about family and inheritance that I had felt but could not say. The ferocity of it was a permission slip.

[Golden Dan]

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. At a particular low point in my life the line about not having to be good felt like someone handing me something I had needed for years. Simple language, enormous weight.

[CodyRhodes99]

Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break. I read it in school as a literary exercise. Read it again as an adult who had experienced loss and it was a completely different poem. Same words, different reader.

[Finley_19]

Ocean Vuong, anything from Night Sky with Exit Wounds. The way he holds grief and tenderness simultaneously in the same line. Changed how I understood what contemporary poetry could do.

[Fox50]

Pablo Neruda in translation. The Clenched Soul. I am aware that translation is its own creative act and I am probably not reading exactly what he wrote, but whatever I am reading does something to me.

[CobyOlaleye]

Carol Ann Duffy, Originally. As someone who moved around a lot as a child the theme of belonging and language and place hit me somewhere specific. The last line still gets me.

[Hitman04]

Wisława Szymborska. View With a Grain of Sand. The philosophical lightness of it. Enormous questions carried without any weight. I have been chasing that tone in my own writing ever since.

[Ridge]

A poem I found in a second-hand book with someone else's annotation in the margin that said simply: yes. I have not been able to find the book since and cannot remember enough of the poem to search for it. It felt complete as an experience though.