Eleanor at You Lil Dickens posted Ask Yourself with the question “Why is Poetry important to you?” I answered:

Poetry expresses many things we cannot layout as plain thoughts, words or deeds. Poetry allows us to mask reality in mysterious verse, soften hard realities, drive home points that need to be made. We can expose our deepest secrets, friendly or foul, in abstruse rhymes and mysterious lines left to the reader to unfold, and decode. Poetry is an avenue to express our feelings about life and death, love and rejection, freedom and oppression, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, sexuality and abstinence, belief and unbelief, good and evil. Through poetry we can express all the symptoms, right and wrong, of being human.

Chuck, The Reluctant Poet, asked me to post it here.