Hello, Reader. It's Merry here, the American-raised, Paris-based writer with another message about finding confidence and comfort in your own company, so you can stop waiting on other people to enjoy your life. Last time, I shared six reasons why spending time alone can be good for you. Today, we're talking about poems for new beginnings to help you start anew. For immediate practice doing things alone without feeling lonely, sign up for my 7-Day Do Things Alone Challenge.

Poems About New Beginnings for When You Need to Start Again

Starting anew can happen at any moment. Joy Sullivan shares her instructions for taking off.

September is the ninth month of the year, but for many, brings the same refreshing feeling of January. Perhaps it’s the smell of fresh notebooks, new class schedules, and first-day-of-school outfits that lingers in our minds and makes the end of the summer feel like a beginning. But sometimes, we get the urge to start anew on a Wednesday. Or in July. Or at two o’clock in the afternoon when we’ve had a very disagreeable morning and want to restart the clock to try to win back those lost, grumpy hours.

A few deep breaths can help. A short walk to the corner and back can bring an entirely new perspective. Sometimes, simply brewing a fresh cup of coffee, cracking your knuckles, and opening to a clean page in a book or notepad can trick our minds into starting the day anew.

It's not always just the morning hours we wish we could take back, though. It’s the entire week, the last few months, or, when our spirits are particularly low and tomorrow feels more like an obligation than an opportunity, it’s the last several years that have been weighing us down, tethered to the ankles.

How to set ourselves free? How to, despite everything, start again?

Poetry can help.

During my college years when melancholy trailed me like cigarette fumes, I found solace in leftover napkins, corners of newspapers (for I used to luxuriate in the free time of a college student by reading the newspaper cover to cover every day at eleven o’clock, accompanied only by a toasted bagel with cream cheese and a black coffee), and torn-out, crinkled notepads. I wrote away the malaise, releasing it from me in a disjointed anthology of mediocre poems thrown together in between classes, during classes, at coffee shops, and even in the car when I would hurry to pull into the nearest parking lot to preserve an idea. In a way, those poems preserved me, or at least the me who was ailing, and in capturing her inky ponderings, those poems set the new me free.

“Professional” poems (what I call those published and printed in a book for mass-market sale) helped set the new me free, too.

During difficult times, my melancholy introduced me to Charles Bukowski, Molière and my beloved, dreamy William Butler Yeats. Their works fed the melancholy, helped it steep and simmer until I felt ready enough to let it go. But it was Joy Sullivan who spooned me an all-together new kind of elixir that tasted like optimism, more like a soup, really, the kind of broth over which someone labors for hours, one spoonful of which is enough to soothe the sorest throat and deliver a week’s worth of bed rest in one warm gulp.

Here are a few loving spoonfuls for you:

MORE ARTICLES ON BOOKS

• ​Quotes About Feeling Alone to Remind Us We're Each Steering Our Own Ship​
• ​9 Books You Can Read in a Day​
• ​Books for Existential Dread​

To starting anew,

Merry

​​​​