Poetry became one of the first places where I could tell the truth without having to explain everything directly. When people think about writing about trauma, they often imagine describing every painful detail. But poetry doesn’t work like a police report. It works like a dream, a symbol, a storm, a strange inner landscape. You don’t have to rhyme. You don’t need perfect grammar. You don’t even need complete sentences. Sometimes healing poetry is fragmented, abstract, repetitive, messy, or symbolic. That’s okay. When I write, I rarely write literally. I write in symbols: ghost flowers, purple waves, forests, oceans, masks, fire, abandoned rooms. Metaphor creates distance when direct language feels too sharp. It lets the nervous system approach pain sideways instead of head-on. A good place to start is asking: • What color is this feeling? • What weather does it carry? • If it became a creature, what would it look like? • If this emotion was a place, where would I be standing? Trauma often lives in images before it lives in words. The poem I attached isn’t literal, but it carries the emotional atmosphere of something real. That’s the power of poetry. Sometimes symbolism tells the truth more honestly than explanation ever could. 🖤🪻🔥