Even the Poets
Poets masquerade as worshippers of beauty. We speak reverently of sunsets, of constellations sewn into the dark, of rain murmuring against forgotten windows, but those are only decorations. The truth is darker than that. All along, we have been listening for the sound of something precious beginning to break.
We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon, waiting for something luminous to fall from the sky. We wait for the rose to brown at its edges, for the summer to end, for love to cloak herself in funeral clothes.
Because beauty untouched is almost unbearable. It is too complete, too alive with the molding of sickly perfection. There is nothing to say about a thing that is happily existing. A flower in bloom needs no poem. But let one petal drop. Let winter’s cruel hand close around its throat. Let the stem bend. Then suddenly language arrives, breathless and desperate at the scene, pen in hand.
I have never trusted the timing of inspiration. It comes too often in the presence of endings. A door closes and a line appears. A heart breaks and metaphors burst like stars in the dark. Something beautiful begins dying, and all the poets in the world turn their heads at once, as if they have heard a distant bell ring out to them.
Perhaps we are awful human beings for this. Or perhaps we are simply honest.
I know there is a part of me that listens to grief the way sailors listen for storms. I can feel it in the air before it arrives, that strange pressure, that gathering darkness. And when it comes, I do not run from it. I stand in the rain with my notebook open, raindrops and tears mingling on the paper until poetry is bred.
Sorrow is fertile ground and heartbreak grows wild things. Some words do not exist until something precious shatters. Poems are made from beauty. They are made from the ruins that beauty leaves behind. A poem is what remains after the fire. A poem is the ash still warm enough to touch. A poem is the echo in the room after someone you love is gone. That is why we write. Because something has vanished and we cannot bear the shape of its absence.
So, we fill the empty places with language. We stitch metaphors over wounds and gather the broken pieces into the light until they shine with potential.
There is something almost shameful about it, the ability to shape grief into something productive. The world splits open and a poet will kneel at the wreckage, not only to mourn but to gather. To collect. To pocket the fragments between the pages of our notebooks, pressing them into the pages to be preserved.
Written by
Olivia Barrett
“So, we fill the empty places with language. We stitch metaphors over wounds and gather the broken pieces into the light until they shine with potential. ”
A wilted flower. An unanswered letter. A goodbye. We are magpies for sorrow, stealing shiny things from the dead. I wonder sometimes if beauty resents us for it. I wonder if the things we love would prefer to disappear quietly, without being transformed into verses and elegies and songs.
But poets have never been good at letting things die in peace. We keep opening graves. We keep calling ghosts by name. We keep taking endings and giving them second lives etched into ink. Perhaps that is all art is: an argument with impermanence. A refusal. A hand pressed against the closing door.
That is why every poem carries a little grief inside it, even the happy ones. Happiness itself is haunted by its ending. We love things because we know they are temporary. We write about them because we know they will not stay. Everything beautiful is already in the process of leaving, and poets know this better than anyone.
So we wait.
Not with cruelty but with terrible patience. We sit at the edge of the world and listen for things to become mortal. We watch the stars burn themselves into darkness. We watch summers collapse into autumn. We watch love become memories. And when something exquisite finally breaks apart, we descend—not to destroy it, but to salvage what we can. A sentence, an image, a handful of words sharp enough to cut our skin.
We convince ourselves that nothing beautiful ever really dies. Only changes shape. Becomes ash. Becomes a memory. Becomes a poem.
Olivia Barrett
Obsessed with endings, silences, and all things ephemeral, Olivia writes to preserve what cannot be kept. Her work wanders through grief, beauty, and the quiet ache of being alive. More of her writing can be found on Substack at @livsdrafts, where she gives a second life to the things that would otherwise disappear.