The power (Hirshfield)

But a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence. Anyone who has written a poem surely has felt this. I think of it as the secret happiness of poems. No matter how grief-filled a poem may be in its contents, the making of it allows the poet to drink from the wellspring of freedom—and that increase of freedom and invention cannot help but afford the poet a balancing sense of happiness.

Jane Hirshfield