Being a poet is not just about seeing the world with an eye for beauty and expressing it. It’s about truth-seeking, opening old wounds and allowing the world to witness our raw, battered flesh. Poets bleed honesty and dream faith. All the love and hurt, triumph and defeat, joy and anger, surprise and
disappointment—all of it comes out when pen meets paper. When we write prose, we may hide behind our characters, letting them take the brunt of public scrutiny, but our poems leave us broken and naked and cold and locked in stocks in the village square, hoping yet fearing to be seen.