By Kestral Gaian, author of Tubelines (Reconnecting Rainbows, October 4 2025)
Did you see that? Whoosh. Another email just flew past, into the void that is my inbox.
I’m sure the world used to be slower than this. It is, however, 2025. Emails pile up, deadlines loom, trains rattle past. Somewhere in the rush, it’s easy to forget that we’re allowed to stop. To breathe. And to play.
You don’t need to dust off your plimsoles or find the nearest playground, but when I think back to playtime at school it really felt like a time set aside for joy, for connection, in a way that our screen breaks and quick lunches rarely are. They refresh the body, perhaps, but not the mind or soul.
This year’s National Poetry Day (2nd October 2025) theme is play. I love that. It’s a reminder that poetry isn’t just something to be studied, dissected, or left behind in school. It’s something alive, something to engage with at any age. When we write or read a poem, we give ourselves permission to step outside the serious to-do lists of life and explore. To pick up a word and juggle it. To twist a phrase until it surprises us. To make sense of the fact that life is strange, and often hilarious, if you look at it closely enough.
I’ve been writing poems since I was a child. They’ve followed me through school corridors, heartbreaks, hospital waiting rooms, long nights out, and early mornings on the Underground. As I’ve got older, poetry has changed shape with me. At first, it was about wrestling with identity. Then, it was about grief and survival. Later, it was a way to map the world, to put down markers in chaos. Now it’s more about slowing down and remembering to pay attention. At every stage, poetry has been a way of connecting: with myself, with others, with the strange and beautiful world around me.
And that’s why poetry still matters. Because connection matters.
Poetry is one of the few art forms that can bridge generations without needing translation. I’ve seen teenagers roll their eyes at Shakespeare in class, then scribble their own verses about heartbreak on the back of the seat on the bus home. I’ve seen grandparents light up when they read a rhyme to a toddler, both of them giggling at the same silly sounds. I’ve read poems at festivals, at weddings, at funerals, and been amazed by how a few lines can create solidarity between people who may share nothing else in common. It’s humbling, really, to watch how a stanza can hold grief for one person and joy for another, and still make both feel understood.
When I was writing the poems that became my new collection, Tubelines, I found myself inspired by the lives of strangers. People who didn’t even know they were stepping into a poem. I wrote what I saw as I sat on the London Underground, with each carriage representing a cross-section of life: elders, teenagers, tired workers, lovers holding hands. Different generations, cultures, and identities brushing shoulders for a few brief stops. That kind of accidental community, fleeting but powerful, is what poetry captures.
But you don’t need a notebook and a rush-hour commute to be a poet. Poetry is everywhere, waiting. It’s in the overheard snippets of conversation at the supermarket. It’s in the quiet of making tea when the world feels too loud. It’s in the small rituals of our days that we rarely stop to notice.
If you’ve never written a poem before or, at least, haven’t since you were forced to at secondary school, National Poetry Day is as good a time as any to give it a try. The point isn’t to be perfect. The point isn’t to use correct form or make everything rhyme. The point is to connect… and, of course, the point is to play. Even if that means writing a sonnet about your cat’s obsession with shredding the furniture. I’m looking at you, kitty.
Poetry has been around for as long as we’ve had language. It’s been scratched into cave walls, sung as protest, whispered as prayer, scrawled on post-it notes, shared in WhatsApp groups. It’s a reminder that even in our fast-moving world, there is value in pausing. In noticing. In giving shape to our experiences and handing them to someone else who might recognise themselves in our words.
So, this National Poetry Day, I invite you to do exactly that. Write something. Read something. Share something. Play with words, even just for a few minutes. Because in those small moments of play, you might just discover a connection you didn’t know you were looking for.