Last night, I held a poetry reading in my home.

There were five of us gathered in my living room, connected by more than thirty years of friendship and a shared willingness to be present with one another.

I had a feeling that if this evening was going to invite anyone to open up, it would need to be just us. No larger audience. No strangers. No need to explain ourselves or perform for anyone outside the circle.

What I didn’t know was that one of us didn’t even like poetry.

And yet, as the evening unfolded, the poems began to find their way in.

Katharine’s words, read aloud, were like an incantation. They awakened memories, evoking people and places, losses and longings, moments from the past we perhaps hadn’t realized we were still carrying. They opened small doors.

They brought with them feelings of guilt and shame, joy and sorrow. And yet, at the end of each poem, there was a feeling of satisfaction—a sense that something had been revealed, acknowledged, and allowed to rest.

The words offered a kind of permission, gently allowing us to let down the façade we spend so much of our lives constructing and maintaining. They slipped beneath the familiar roles and identities—the selves we present to one another and to the world—and touched something more tender. They gave us space to simply be.

They were also a balm.

There was something in hearing another human being name an experience—especially one we might have thought was ours alone—that soothed old wounds. The poems allowed us to acknowledge the complicated things. To feel without immediately having to explain. And perhaps, most importantly, they reminded us that we are not alone.

Maybe that is what poetry can do at its best.

It does not always need to be understood in an intellectual sense. Sometimes we don’t need to like poetry before it can move us. Sometimes we simply need to hear a few words that find the place in us where something has been waiting—quietly, patiently—to be recognized.

Last night, in a small room filled with women who have shared more than three decades of friendship, poetry became a key.

And for a little while, we opened.