Trying to Understand Poetry

I grew up thinking poems followed a few very simple rules. The biggest rule, at least in my mind, was that poems had to rhyme. I did not question it. That idea had been planted so early that it felt like basic common sense, the way you assume pancakes are round or that dogs like bones.

The first poems I ever heard were nursery rhymes. My mother used to say them while cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall" was one I remember clearly because she always tapped the counter when she said the word fall. I did not know what a wall like that looked like. I did not know who Humpty Dumpty was supposed to be. But the rhythm and the rhyme stuck in my head.

Later in school, poems worked the same way. Teachers handed out short poems with neat little rhymes at the end of each line. Cat rhymed with hat. Tree rhymed with bee. If you had asked ten year old me what poetry meant, I would have said something like, "It is when the last words match."

Nobody ever said this rule out loud, but it felt obvious.

When I got older I kept running into the same pattern. The famous poems people quoted always rhymed. Lines ended with matching sounds. They almost felt like songs without music. Sometimes people recited them dramatically during school assemblies or reading events. Even then I noticed how everyone waited for the rhyme at the end of the line, almost like the punchline of a joke.

So the idea settled deep in my brain. Poetry rhymes. That is just how it works.

The funny part is that I never actually tried writing poetry myself for most of my life. I read poems sometimes. I liked them in a casual way, the way you might enjoy a short story in a magazine while waiting for a haircut. But writing one felt different. It seemed like something serious people did. People who owned notebooks full of mysterious thoughts and drank coffee in quiet rooms.

I was not one of those people.

Most days my life looked pretty ordinary. I worked in a small office that handled equipment orders for construction companies. My desk sat near the back window where the sun hit the filing cabinets in the afternoon. The job was mostly numbers and email chains and phone calls about delayed shipments. Nothing poetic about it, unless someone wants to write a poem about forklifts and paperwork.

Evenings were simple. I usually walked home past a row of maple trees that dropped tiny helicopter seeds all over the sidewalk. Sometimes I cooked something easy like pasta. Sometimes I watched television. On weekends I ran errands, met friends for coffee, or visited my sister and her kids.

Poetry lived somewhere else in my mind. It belonged to bookshelves and classrooms, not my actual routine.

But one rainy Saturday afternoon something strange happened. I had planned to clean my apartment. Instead I ended up sitting by the window with a notebook that I had bought months earlier and barely used.

Outside, the rain kept sliding down the glass in crooked lines. Cars moved slowly through puddles. The whole afternoon had that quiet gray feeling that makes you think too much.

I do not remember exactly why the idea came to me. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe I had read something recently that made poetry seem less mysterious. Whatever the reason, I suddenly thought it might be interesting to try.

I opened the notebook.

The blank page felt oddly intimidating.

For a minute I just tapped the pen against the paper and stared out the window again. Rain kept falling. Somewhere down the street a dog barked once and then stopped.

Finally I decided there was no reason to overthink it. If people all over the world could do it, surely I could manage at least one small attempt.

When I decided to write a poem, I assumed rhyme was the most important part.

That felt like the obvious place to start. Every poem I remembered had rhymes. So my first job, logically, was to think of words that matched.

I looked out the window again and noticed the moon faintly behind the clouds, barely visible in the gray sky. It seemed like a decent subject. Poets always wrote about the moon, right? That seemed very poetic.

So I wrote my first line.

The moon hangs quiet in the sky

That part felt promising. I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself. The line sounded serious. It even had that gentle rhythm that poems seemed to have.

Then I remembered the next step.

It needed to rhyme.

Immediately my brain started searching for words that matched sky.

High.
Fly.
Sigh.

I wrote another line.

The moon hangs quiet in the sky
While drifting clouds go slowly by

I paused and read the two lines again. Technically it worked. Sky and by rhymed perfectly. But something about the sentence felt slightly stiff, like a shirt that does not quite fit your shoulders.

Still, I told myself that poetry probably felt awkward at first. Every skill does. The important thing was to keep going.

I tapped the pen against the notebook again and looked outside. Rain continued sliding down the glass, making long crooked paths that merged and split again.

The strange thing is that the moment I started focusing on rhymes, the scene outside the window stopped mattering. Instead of noticing the rain or the quiet street, my mind started flipping through matching sounds like a dictionary with a broken spine.

Soon.
June.
Tune.

The moon was still sitting in the cloudy sky outside my window, but the poem already felt like it had drifted somewhere else.

At that moment I had no idea that this small struggle with rhymes was about to turn into a much bigger problem. I simply believed I was following the rules the way poems had always worked.

And because of that belief, the next few lines became a strange kind of puzzle instead of a description of what I was actually seeing.

I did not know it yet, but I had already stepped into what I would later think of as the rhyme trap.

The strange thing about rhymes is that once you start chasing them, they take control faster than you expect.

At first it felt harmless. I had two lines that rhymed and a blank page underneath them. The rain outside kept tapping against the window in that quiet, steady way that makes the whole afternoon feel slow. I should have been describing that moment. The cloudy sky. The wet pavement. The tired maple trees bending in the wind.

Instead my brain was busy sorting through rhyming sounds.

Moon had become the center of everything. I had written about it in the first line, so now I felt stuck with it. Every new sentence had to orbit that word like a small planet.

Moon.

Soon.
June.
Tune.
Balloon.

I tried the next line.

The moon hangs quiet in the sky
While drifting clouds go slowly by
It glows above the world so soon

I stopped writing.

That sentence did not even make sense. The moon does not glow "soon." I had only written the word because it rhymed with moon. Already the poem was drifting away from anything real.

I crossed out the line.

For a minute I stared at the notebook and rubbed the side of my forehead with my fingers. Maybe I had rushed it. Maybe the right rhyme simply had not appeared yet.

So I tried again.

The moon hangs quiet in the sky
While drifting clouds go slowly by
A silver light begins in June

That was worse. Now the poem sounded like a strange weather report written by someone who had never actually seen the sky.

I leaned back in my chair and laughed a little, though it was the kind of laugh you make when something is not quite funny. The truth was starting to creep in.

This was harder than I expected.

Still, I kept going. The whole point of sitting down that afternoon was to try something new, and quitting after three lines felt ridiculous. I turned the page and started again from the beginning.

This time I told myself to keep things simple. Just describe what I could see.

Rain taps softly on the street

That line came easily. It even felt more natural than the moon line. I looked out the window again and saw the puddles forming along the curb. Cars rolled through them slowly, sending small waves toward the sidewalk.

But then the old rule came back.

The line needed to rhyme.

Street.

Heat.
Beat.
Seat.
Meet.

I waited for one of those words to fit naturally, but none of them belonged in the scene outside my window. There was no heat. No one was meeting anyone. The street itself was empty except for rainwater and the occasional passing car.

Still, I forced a line anyway.

Rain taps softly on the street
Where tired shoes and puddles meet

I read it again.

It was not terrible. But it was not honest either. There were no shoes outside. I had invented them because the rhyme demanded it.

This is where the process started feeling strange.

Every time I tried to write a poem, I ended up spending more time searching for rhymes than noticing what I wanted to describe. Words that matched each other began to matter more than the actual moment sitting right in front of me.

I wrote a few more lines. Each one felt slightly less connected to reality.

Rain taps softly on the street
Where tired shoes and puddles meet
The cloudy sky begins to weep

I stared at that last sentence.

The sky begins to weep.

Technically it sounded poetic. But it also sounded like something printed on a decorative mug in a gift shop. The phrase felt borrowed, like I had accidentally wandered into someone else's poem.

I crossed out half the page.

The next attempt did not go much better.

This time I tried starting with a memory instead of the rainy afternoon outside my window. I remembered a small lake near my parents' house where the water turned completely still in the evening. The surface sometimes looked like glass. That seemed like a peaceful place for a poem to begin.

The lake grows calm at end of day

That line felt nice. I could picture the lake clearly. The tall grass along the shore. The faint buzzing of insects in the air.

But once again the rhyme problem returned.

Day.

Way.
Stay.
Gray.
Play.

Soon the second line appeared.

The lake grows calm at end of day
While quiet shadows drift away

I sighed.

The sentence worked, but something about it felt predictable. I had seen phrases like that before. It sounded like a greeting card, not something I had actually experienced.

I kept writing anyway.

By now the notebook contained several small poems, each one circling around rhymes like a dog chasing its own tail. The lines matched each other neatly, but none of them felt alive.

One page talked about moonlight. Another talked about rain. Another one mentioned the lake again. But every version had the same problem.

The rhymes were deciding what the poem said.

At one point I even tried using a rhyming website on my phone. I typed in words like sky and street and lake, hoping a better rhyme would appear.

Hundreds of options popped up instantly.

Stake.
Wake.
Ache.
Break.

The list went on forever. But the longer I stared at it, the stranger the whole process felt. Instead of describing a real moment, I was building sentences out of spare parts that happened to match.

And somehow that made the poem feel less real every minute.

Still, I refused to give up completely. After all, plenty of people knew how to start a poem. They did it all the time. Entire books of poetry filled library shelves. If they could do it, surely there had to be a way through this strange maze of rhymes.

I flipped to a fresh page in the notebook and told myself one more attempt would solve the problem.

What I did not realize at the time was that the problem had nothing to do with effort. Or patience. Or talent.

The real problem was the rule I had believed for most of my life.

The rule that said poems had to rhyme.

And that rule was quietly steering every line in the wrong direction.

By the time the rain stopped that afternoon, my notebook looked like a small battlefield.

Lines were crossed out. Arrows pointed from one sentence to another. Whole pages had been abandoned halfway down because the rhyme I needed never showed up. A few words were circled for no clear reason except that they had sounded promising five minutes earlier.

I sat there flipping back through the pages, trying to understand what had gone wrong.

The strange part was that none of the lines were terrible by themselves. Some even sounded a little poetic. They had rhythm. They had rhymes. If someone heard them quickly, they might even assume they belonged in a real poem.

But when I read them slowly, something felt off.

The words did not feel connected to anything I had actually seen or experienced that day.

They felt manufactured.

I found one version near the middle of the notebook and read it again.

The moon hangs quiet in the sky
While drifting clouds go slowly by
A silver light across the lake
Where shadows stir and branches shake

At first glance it looked respectable. The rhymes were neat. Sky matched by. Lake matched shake. The lines flowed smoothly enough.

But the more I stared at it, the more it bothered me.

There had been no lake outside my window. No branches shaking. I had not even looked at a lake that day. The entire scene existed only because those words rhymed.

The poem had slowly drifted away from reality without me noticing.

That realization made something inside my chest sink a little.

I turned the page and found another version.

Rain taps softly on the street
Where wandering footsteps slowly meet
The clouds above begin to cry
As lonely winds go drifting by

I read that one twice.

It sounded dramatic. Almost theatrical. But again it had almost nothing to do with the quiet rainy afternoon I had been watching through my window. There had been no wandering footsteps. No lonely winds. The street had mostly been empty except for a delivery truck and a woman walking her dog.

Somehow the rhymes had pushed the poem toward words that sounded poetic instead of words that were true.

That was when doubt started creeping in.

Maybe this was normal. Maybe every beginner struggled like this. But another thought kept tapping at the back of my mind.

Maybe I simply did not know how to write a poem.

The idea made me uncomfortable. Not because poetry was important to my life, but because the failure felt strangely personal. I had sat down with honest curiosity and ended up with something that felt artificial.

I flipped through the notebook again and noticed something interesting.

Every time the rhyme appeared, the sentence changed direction.

If I wrote the word moon, the next line started chasing soon or June. If I wrote street, the poem started inventing shoes or heat or meetings that had never happened.

It was like the rhymes were steering the car while I sat helpless in the passenger seat.

That thought made me laugh quietly, though the laugh carried a little frustration with it.

I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes for a moment. The room had grown darker since the rain stopped. Evening was slowly settling outside the window, and the streetlights were starting to glow faintly along the sidewalk.

For a second I considered closing the notebook and forgetting the whole experiment. After all, nothing in my daily life required poetry. My job would continue tomorrow whether or not I ever wrote another line.

But curiosity kept me sitting there.

Why did people enjoy writing poems if the process felt this awkward?

I tried to imagine what experienced poets might be doing differently. Did they simply know more rhymes? That seemed unlikely. Even with the rhyming list on my phone, the sentences still sounded strange.

Maybe they had better vocabulary. Maybe they possessed some mysterious creative instinct that allowed them to juggle meaning and rhyme at the same time.

The more I thought about it, the more the whole thing began to feel like a puzzle I had been solving incorrectly.

One page in the notebook caught my eye again. It contained a half finished poem I had abandoned earlier.

The lake grows calm at end of day
While quiet shadows drift away
The wind begins its gentle tune
Beneath the rising silver moon

I read it out loud.

The rhyme worked perfectly. Day matched away. Tune matched moon. If this had been a school assignment when I was ten years old, I probably would have been proud of it.

But now, reading it as an adult, I could hear the problem clearly.

The poem was not describing anything real.

The wind does not play tunes. Shadows do not drift away in quite that way. Even the phrase rising silver moon sounded like something copied from a thousand other poems.

Every rhyme had quietly nudged the lines toward familiar sounding phrases.

The poem was smooth, but empty.

That realization hit me harder than I expected. It was not just that the poem was bad. It was that I had followed the rule exactly and still ended up somewhere meaningless.

Which raised a troubling question.

If rhyme was the rule I had always believed, and following that rule produced lines like these, what exactly was poetry supposed to be doing?

I stared at the notebook for a long time after that.

The page in front of me contained all the effort I had put into the afternoon. Several attempts. Careful rhymes. Dozens of crossed out words.

And yet none of it felt like a real poem.

For the first time that day I wondered whether the problem was not my ability to write a poem, but the rule I had started with.

At the time I did not have an answer.

But a conversation a few days later would quietly dismantle that rule and replace it with something much simpler.

A few days later I brought the notebook with me to a small coffee shop near my office.

It was not a planned decision. The notebook had simply ended up in my bag that morning, probably because I had tossed it in there while cleaning the apartment earlier in the week. During lunch I walked down the block, ordered a sandwich, and sat near the front window where people passed by on the sidewalk.

The notebook sat on the table beside my plate like it had been waiting for attention.

I opened it again while I ate.

Looking at those pages in public made the poems feel even stranger than they had in my apartment. Lines that once seemed promising now looked stiff and overly serious. A few of them almost made me smile in a slightly embarrassed way.

Halfway through my sandwich I heard someone say my name.

It was Daniel.

Daniel and I had worked together years earlier at a different office. He now freelanced as a graphic designer and spent a lot of afternoons working from this coffee shop. We talked for a few minutes about work and mutual friends, and then he noticed the notebook on the table.

"Writing something?" he asked.

I hesitated before answering.

"Trying to," I said.

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. Daniel had always been one of those calm people who listened more than he talked. He glanced at the open notebook but did not reach for it right away.

"What kind of writing?"

I shrugged.

"I tried to put words into a poem."

He smiled slightly, not in a teasing way, just curious.

"How did it go?"

I turned the notebook around and slid it across the table.

"You can read it if you want," I said. "But fair warning, it might be terrible."

Daniel flipped through the pages slowly while the coffee shop hummed quietly around us. A grinder buzzed behind the counter. Someone laughed near the door. Outside, a delivery truck rolled past with a low rattling sound.

He read the poems without saying anything for a while.

I watched his face carefully, trying to guess what he thought. He did not look confused or critical. Mostly he just looked thoughtful.

Finally he closed the notebook and rested his hand on top of it.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Sure."

"Why are you trying so hard to rhyme everything?"

I blinked.

"Because poems rhyme," I said.

Daniel laughed softly.

"Some poems rhyme."

I frowned slightly. The distinction sounded small but also strange.

"Aren't they supposed to?" I asked.

He leaned back in the chair and folded his arms.

"Not necessarily. Rhyme is just one technique. Some poets use it. A lot of poets don't."

I stared at him.

For a moment I thought he might be joking. But his expression stayed completely calm.

"Then why does everyone think poems rhyme?" I asked.

Daniel shrugged.

"Probably because the poems people remember from childhood rhyme. Nursery rhymes, school poems, song lyrics. Those stick in your memory. But poetry itself is much wider than that."

He opened the notebook again and pointed to one of my earlier lines.

Rain taps softly on the street

"This part is good," he said.

"It is?" I asked.

"Yes. Because it sounds like something you actually saw."

He tapped the next line underneath it.

Where tired shoes and puddles meet

"This line," he said gently, "sounds like you were chasing a rhyme."

I laughed a little.

"I was."

Daniel nodded.

"You can hear it. The poem stops looking at the street and starts looking for words that match."

That description landed perfectly. It explained the strange feeling I had experienced all afternoon while writing those lines.

"So what are you supposed to do instead?" I asked.

Daniel shrugged again.

"Look around. Notice things. Describe them honestly. Rhythm will happen naturally if the sentences feel real."

I looked down at the notebook.

"But if the lines don't rhyme, is it still a poem?"

"Of course," he said.

He paused for a second and then added something that quietly shifted the way I thought about the whole process.

"When you draft a poem, you don't have to decorate every line. Sometimes the simplest description is the strongest."

That idea felt both strange and relieving at the same time.

For most of my life I had assumed poetry required a kind of verbal acrobatics. Fancy rhymes. Dramatic phrases. Words that sounded impressive.

But Daniel was describing something different. Something closer to observation than performance.

Before leaving the coffee shop that afternoon, he showed me a website he sometimes read when he needed a short creative break during the day. I had never heard of it before. The page contained dozens of poems written by regular people, not just famous poets.

Some of them rhymed.

Many of them did not.

One poem described a bus ride in four quiet lines. Another described someone washing dishes late at night while rain tapped the kitchen window. None of them tried to force matching sounds at the end of each sentence.

I found myself reading slowly, surprised by how natural the lines felt.

A few minutes later I clicked a page that talked about the experience of trying to write a poem for the first time, and something about that moment shifted the direction of my own attempt. The examples on the page sounded simple and direct, almost like someone thinking out loud.

Daniel finished his coffee and stood up to leave.

"Try it again sometime," he said, nodding toward the notebook. "Just describe what you actually see."

Then he headed out the door and disappeared into the afternoon crowd.

I sat there for another ten minutes staring at the page on my laptop.

For the first time since opening that notebook, writing a poem felt less like solving a puzzle and more like paying attention.

That evening I sat at the same small table in my apartment where the first attempt had gone so badly.

The notebook lay open again, but this time I did not start writing immediately. I kept thinking about what Daniel had said in the coffee shop.

Look around. Notice things.

The idea sounded almost too simple. For years I had believed poetry required clever rhymes and elegant phrases. Now I was supposed to do the opposite and simply describe what was in front of me.

Still, curiosity pushed me forward.

Outside the window the sky had cleared completely. The rain from earlier in the week had washed the air clean, and the evening light stretched across the buildings in long orange stripes. A neighbor somewhere down the hall was cooking something with garlic, and the smell drifted faintly into the room through the hallway.

I picked up the pen.

This time I did not search for rhymes. I just wrote the first thing I noticed.

The streetlight flickers once before turning steady

I paused and looked at the line.

It did not rhyme with anything. It did not even try. But it sounded exactly like the moment outside my window. The streetlight down the block really did flicker once before glowing fully every evening.

I added another line.

A man waits at the corner while checking his phone

The scene outside continued to unfold slowly as I wrote. A bus rolled past. Two people crossed the street while talking. Somewhere nearby a car door slammed.

None of the lines rhymed.

For a few seconds that still felt slightly wrong, like breaking a rule that had been drilled into my head since childhood. I half expected the poem to collapse without the rhymes holding it together.

But something surprising happened instead.

The sentences began to move naturally.

I kept writing.

A bus exhales at the stop
Someone laughs across the street
A dog pulls its owner toward a fire hydrant

When I read those lines back to myself, they sounded calm and ordinary. But they also felt more alive than anything I had written earlier in the week.

There was no searching for matching sounds. No wandering into phrases about silver moons or drifting shadows. Every line came directly from what I could see or hear in that moment.

For the first time I felt like I might actually understand how to write a poem.

That realization made me grin a little.

The poem was not dramatic. It was not elegant. But it belonged to a real moment in my life instead of a collection of rhyming phrases pulled from thin air.

I kept going.

The wind lifts a loose receipt along the sidewalk
The streetlight hums softly above the intersection

At one point I stopped and laughed quietly because the poem felt almost too simple. Years of believing poetry required complicated tricks had made this straightforward approach seem strange.

Yet the more I wrote, the clearer the scene became.

I was not trying to impress anyone. I was just describing what was happening outside my window.

That freedom made the process surprisingly enjoyable.

Halfway down the page I leaned back in the chair and read the poem from the beginning. The lines did not rhyme. They did not even follow a strict rhythm. But they carried a quiet consistency, like footsteps along a sidewalk.

More importantly, the poem felt honest.

It described a specific evening, on a specific street, seen from a specific window.

I remembered how difficult it had been earlier in the week when I tried try to put a few lines together about the moon. The rhymes had pushed the sentences into strange directions until the whole thing sounded like a greeting card.

Now the opposite was happening.

By ignoring rhyme completely, the words stayed connected to what I was actually seeing.

The poem ended with three short lines.

A cyclist glides past the empty bus stop
Someone upstairs drops a pan
The street grows quiet again

I set the pen down and read it one more time.

Was it a masterpiece?

Definitely not.

But it was real.

And for the first time since opening that notebook, the page did not feel like a failure. It felt like a beginning.

That small success made me curious about something else. What would happen if I tried writing another poem the same way tomorrow? Or the next day?

For the first time, the idea of sitting down again to write a poem did not feel intimidating.

It felt interesting.

And that might have been the most surprising discovery of the entire week.

Over the next few weeks the notebook slowly filled with small poems.

Not big dramatic ones. Nothing that would win prizes or appear in famous magazines. Most of them were about ordinary moments that would probably look boring to someone else.

A grocery store line that moved painfully slow.

A train ride where everyone stared quietly at their phones.

The way sunlight crept across my kitchen counter in the morning and slowly warmed the coffee mug sitting there.

But the strange thing was that writing them no longer felt frustrating.

The early attempts in my notebook still looked like a graveyard of rhymes. Pages about moons, lakes, and winds that sounded like they belonged in someone else's imagination. Those poems had been built out of matching sounds instead of real moments.

Once I stopped chasing rhymes, everything changed.

The process became quieter.

Instead of hunting for clever words, I started noticing details during the day. A cracked sidewalk tile. The way a dog tilted its head when someone called its name. The faint buzzing noise inside a grocery store refrigerator case.

These little things had always been there, but I had never paid much attention to them before.

Now they kept turning into lines.

One afternoon I sat in a park during lunch break and watched a group of children trying to fly a kite that refused to cooperate. The wind kept dropping at the wrong moments, and the kite flopped sideways into the grass again and again.

Earlier in my life I might have tried turning that scene into something overly poetic. I probably would have forced lines about skies and freedom and soaring wings.

Instead I just wrote what happened.

The kite drags across the grass
A boy runs anyway
The string shakes like a loose thread in the wind

Three simple lines.

No rhyme anywhere.

But when I read them later that evening, the moment returned clearly. I could see the grass again, hear the distant laughter, feel the uncertain wind.

That was when I finally understood something Daniel had been trying to explain.

The difficulty most beginners feel when they try composing a poem often comes from believing the wrong rules.

For years I had assumed poetry required clever tricks. Rhymes that matched perfectly. Phrases that sounded impressive. Words arranged carefully so they felt special.

But those expectations created pressure. Every line had to perform a small magic trick.

Once that pressure disappeared, the process became much lighter.

Poetry started to feel less like constructing something and more like noticing things.

Sometimes the poems were only five or six lines long. Sometimes they stretched across half a page. A few of them even developed their own rhythm without me planning it.

Occasionally I experimented with rhyme again just to see what would happen. But now it felt like a choice instead of a rule. If the rhyme appeared naturally, I kept it. If it did not, the poem moved on without it.

That small shift changed everything.

Friends occasionally asked what I was writing in the notebook when they saw it sitting on the table during lunch breaks. I never claimed to be a poet. That word still sounded too serious for what I was doing.

Mostly I just told them I had been experimenting.

Trying things.

Paying attention.

Sometimes I showed them a few lines if they were curious. The reactions were usually quiet but encouraging. People recognized the moments being described because they had experienced similar ones themselves.

A flickering streetlight.

A slow grocery line.

A stubborn kite dragging across grass.

Those everyday scenes seemed to connect with people more easily than the earlier rhyming poems about moons and drifting shadows.

Looking back, I think the most important lesson was surprisingly simple.

Writing poetry had never been the impossible puzzle I imagined. I had just started with a rule that did not actually belong there.

The belief that poems must rhyme had been sitting in my mind since childhood, quietly steering every attempt in the wrong direction.

Once that belief loosened its grip, the whole experience opened up.

Now when someone tells me they tried to write poetry and became frustrated after a few lines, I usually ask them the same question Daniel asked me in that coffee shop.

Are you chasing rhymes?

Most of the time the answer is yes.

And that makes sense. Many of us learned poetry through rhyming songs and nursery rhymes. It feels natural to assume that is the main ingredient.

But the truth is much simpler.

Poetry can begin with noticing something small.

The way rain slides down a window.

The sound of a chair scraping across a quiet room.

The feeling of evening light touching the edge of a building.

Those moments are already full of rhythm and meaning before any rhyme appears.

Learning to write a poem became easier the moment I stopped trying to make everything rhyme.

The page stopped feeling like a puzzle.

It started feeling like a place to look closely at the world for a few minutes.

And that, at least for me, turned poetry from something intimidating into something quietly enjoyable.