13 Sep 2021
Life's been particularly tough recently[1] and my mental health hasn't been the best over the course of this past year.
There is a pretty nice way to just relax, get your feelings out and just zen! It's poetry! You probably treat it as some weird old curiosity that some 20th century people did but it's still alive and kicking.
Poems are essentially texts that use aesthetic or rhythmic elements of langauge to convey meaning, kinda like lyrics without the music!
I personally like the short, while restrictive, style of poetry: haikus, so that is what I'm going to talk about.
Haikus are short poems (3 lines long), that don't require rhyming and instead have each line have a specific amount of syllables (5 on the first, 7 on the second, 5 on the last, 5-7-5).
They must also convey a meaning, emotion or thought however. I wrote a haiku about love a couple days ago so as an example that I can use, I'll share "The Heart"[2].
The heart yearns for love
One poetically sane
The two souls entwined
This is a quite abstract example however you can see it conveys an emotion (love) and has 5-7-5 syllables.
So if you really want to note down your emotions, maybe try poems! Footnotes [1] And if you don't know why, you either have lived under a rock for the past 18 months or you're reading this hundreds of years in the future.
[2] Cringe all you want but you chose to read an article about poetry.