Shirley Xiao, Shenzhen College of International Education

My journey with poetry couldn’t have been easier or more difficult.

While most children my age struggled with new words, I was able to fetch from my little vault of vocabulary the words that rhymed, and cluster them into poetic lines, although sometimes they didn’t make sense.

I got my first taste of poetry from Dr. Seuss and Lewis Carroll (who wrote many poems in “Alice in Wonderland”) and eagerly mimicked their works. When in kindergarten, I wrote “I am old, my teeth are gold; I have a bird I like to hold.”

I never thought of the purpose of writing. Reading and writing poetry came naturally to me just like sleeping or drinking water.

For me, dropping a few lines down every day has become a daily routine that brings me great joy, even at times when I have to search desperately for a rhyme. The satisfaction from writing poetry, stories or about any random thoughts has always been a unique experience.

After coming to middle school, I stopped writing stories completely, and wrote less poetry. I still wrote childish stuff, such as “The Bird and the Worm,” but found less enjoyment reading them.

I felt as if I were a snake, about to slough in spring, molting out of my tag of nursery rhymes and struggling into a new tag: to write poems with feelings and meanings. I started to feel writing nursery rhymes was too childish, although my journey with poetry had launched with nursery rhymes. That was when I stopped writing poetry altogether.

This long “slough” lasted for two years, during which time I wrote only if it was very necessary, as in school assignments. Then I came to my current school SCIE, a place where individualism is encouraged. As I studied poetry at the school, I became even more intimidated by those real poets’ great works. I had been a frog in the well who knew nothing about the sea. Now that I had higher expectations for myself, I found it difficult to write anything at all.

This semester, I finally realized that things had to change and decided to give it a go. I wrote “Prayer Before Death” even though I do not have the experience, making up for what I don’t have with my imagination. I’ve regained the happiness that nothing but poetry can give me.

I still don’t know what poetry is, but I rejoice in this form of writing that expresses so many things with such beauty of words and overflowing with such rich emotions. After all, poetry could be the most special part of me.