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Poetry involves a multisensory experience where the reader finds specific passages relatable and tugs at the heartstrings. Despite the tragic things in our lives, poetry and happiness are still possible.

Have you ever had a wonderstruck moment where you feel that your poetry journey found something that warms your heart? That is the power of poetry. It contains a mystical machine of words that take us to different places with each line, verse, and piece.

And in the book Tales of a Traveler in Poetry and Prose Along the Road Before Me by Brion K. Hanks, you can feel the inspiration flowing through every page. Brion’s poetry can make readers feel alive even while dealing with loss. The reader won’t feel alone because of the shared experiences that Brion K. Hanks enabled in his poetry journey. His poetry for family and friends teaches people to live on with no regrets and move forward despite the emptiness they have to carry.

Brion invites you to go to his website: www.BrionKHanks-Poetry.com as a means to get a good sense of him and his poetry. He believes that sharing is caring.

All of us are simple travelers here for a short while. And because nothing is certain, we want to make the most of our experiences with the ones we love. However, such pain and sorrow can never be comprehended when those loved ones leave us behind to move towards a new path without us. That’s why Brion K. Hanks wrote poetry books that deal with grief to comfort those in their pit stops.

When poems make us feel things

When we are alive, we feel our senses functioning normally. But when we experience catastrophic things, there are times when our feelings are simultaneously at our lowest and highest. We may feel highly numb or too absorbed in our pain which blocks external forces from being felt.

The poetry journey involves our sense of sight.

Seeing the world through our eyes is vital to being alive. What makes the poetry journey fascinating is how it makes us visualize the dark and colorful parts of the world. Poets want readers to take a careful “look” at what they’ve seen through with every word. Poetry is also more of a “show, not tell” pattern. It usually contains visual descriptions that let readers understand the poetry experience through sight.

Poems also require our hearing and other senses. 

Every word comes alive when all our fundamental senses are tickled. We may use our sight and comprehension to read through poems, but the ultimate poetry journey begins with all of our senses – sight, touch, sound, and taste. In poetry’s case, sight and sound are the most tackled ones. This is due to the auditory imagery often utilized to induce the feeling of hearing what the poet or narrator is saying, other than seeing what they’re doing.

Poetry makes you confront reality.

For every loss you go through, they make you want to stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror. Thankfully, the poetry journey helps a reader run from and confront the root cause of all the loss. Reality has its way of making you feel left out with no one to reach out to. Poetry can empathize with you in a way that stretches out its hand.

The end of the road in every poetry journey

Relating to one another is another struggle humanity faces in every generation. We are prone to misunderstandings and miscommunications when we can’t find a situation to place our empathy, sympathy, or apathy. Truthfully, some readers don’t have any particular end goal in their poetry journey. They want to pick apart something that resonates with them and make those words part of their whole being. 

Here’s the thing about poetry – both the writer and reader can connect and share similar experiences and feelings without necessarily contacting each other. The healing poetry journey has a mutual effect, looking deep into a person’s soul, weighing the burden on their hearts and minds. Poems also serve as both lock and key that opens the doors of our souls. With poetry, it feels like it holds our hand through it all, enabling a sense of comfort as it sheds light on the darkest crevices of our souls.

Through embarking on a poetry journey, we may finally understand each other. Poems were designed to help us communicate when we can’t find the words to convey our feelings. Especially losing a loved one or something significant in life, there are no coherent words that could describe the pang of guilt, hurt, and numbness.