The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.

Natasha Trethewey Quotes