We Share Poems. Do We Read Them?

A voice in public

Amanda Gorman read The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021. By then, she had published a book and been named the first US National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017.

Her poem addresses a country, and makes room within that address for a young Black woman descended from enslaved people and raised by a single mother. The speaker asking others to imagine a future has a history of her own.

The writing rewards listening. Gorman repeats “arms”, moving from weapons to an embrace. Hearing the word change meaning gives the thought time to happen. A quotation on a screen might send someone looking for the reading.

Someone at the door

Brazilian poet Ryane Leão has shared her writing on Instagram for more than a decade, according to her publisher. Her 2025 collection Ninguém pode parar uma mulher ventania includes “quando os amores findam inesperadamente”, a poem about the aftermath of a breakup.

Friends come over. They undo the distressed woman’s braids and change her sheets. Later, they ask where things are in the kitchen. The television stays off.

Leão gives friendship something to do while the person in pain can barely manage the day. The poem’s second-person address puts the reader inside that care. It might be sent to someone after a breakup, with an offer to come over.

A body in the words

Cécile Coulon’s Les Ronces appeared in 2018. She explains that it gathers poems posted online between 2010 and 2017, following an earlier refusal to publish them on paper. A text encountered in a few seconds may have years of writing behind it.

In “Courir”, a voracious force inhabits joints that creak at night. Running becomes slightly unfamiliar. I would want to spend time with that image before deciding how it relates to me. A poem can leave something unresolved after its first reading.

The words we need from each other

Poetry may be among the most human things we do. We struggle to explain a feeling, then spend time choosing words for it, knowing someone else will have to make sense of them. Being understood is never certain.

I think of the friends in Leão’s poem asking where things are kept in the kitchen. They have come to help and still need directions. That detail leaves room for the awkwardness of caring for another person, whose grief we cannot feel exactly as they do.

A poem can bring us that close to someone. We recognise a gesture or stumble over an image, and briefly give another person’s experience our attention. Sometimes we send the words on because we hope they will reach someone we have struggled to reach ourselves.

The message might be only a link, followed by: I thought of you.