This is how poetry heals: discomfort, honesty, burning transformation, release… feel it and heal it … and poetry helps ... Poet Tamar Zhghenti presents her poem ...
Prize-winning Georgian poet Tamar Zhghenti is the Poet in Residence on my Rainy Day Healing website. She presents “Poetry” – about its healing power. Tamar’s poem feels like stepping into a world where light has weight, where illumination is something you can swallow, hold, and finally release. The poem personifies poetry as a small sun: warm, volatile, transformative. I feel as if I can ingest it whole. It is a metaphor for the healing process that is uncomfortable, burning, and yet absolutely life-giving. The initial feeling is a sharp, prickling heat, like warm metal resting too long on the skin. The swallowing is both silky and dangerously hot, like tasting something bright and molten. Later, the ache is a deep, slow twist, and a heaviness becoming effervescence. The poem has the tang of something sacred and slightly bitter, like pressing a tongue to a copper coin warmed by the sun. Then it softens into the familiar earthiness of corn, the sharp mustard-seed spice of emotion, the rich smoothness of a yolk. Nourishing, in the end. Golds and yolk-yellows dominate the poem, shifting from the harsh, almost acidic glare of a swallowed sun to the soft, familiar hues of corn and mustard. The stomach feels lit from within; an internal sunrise. There’s also a faint, burnished orange from the fire that churns before becoming light again. There’s nausea; gentle, luminous nausea as if too much light has been taken in and the body must adjust. But it is not sickness; it’s activation. When the light rises again, it feels like the warmth of a heart expanding through the chest. The poem is a meditation on how poetry heals. A wound, a painful feeling begins with discomfort, the raw honesty that must be swallowed. It acknowledges that transformation often burns. It honours the internal process; the turning, the churning, the ache. Finally, it celebrates the return of light: the moment when expression becomes release. The act of swallowing a sun mirrors swallowing pain, tears, memories, and difficult truths. But the poem insists that if we have held sorrow, we can hold light too. The healing is not smooth or delicate; it is visceral, digestive, alchemical. Poetry becomes a fire that moves through the body and resurfaces as illumination rather than injury. When the speaker says “Effervesce!” the poem shifts from internal struggle to radiant offering. The final sensation is that of rising. Tiny bubbles of light are bursting upward, turning heat into brilliance. - Commentary by Martina Nicolls “Poetry” by Tamar Zhghenti, December 2025. It begins with feeling slightly sick— the kind of nausea caused by swallowing a sun. Not the largest star, of course, but still inconvenient for the stomach. First, open your mouth, look the light in the face, extend your tongue, and take the sun whole— the way a frog might snatch a passing glowworm. It burns, yes. That’s part of the arrangement. People will doubt your stomach can hold such matter. Let them. You know there’s room. Anyone who has swallowed tears has space enough for greater fires. The sun, once tasted, becomes ordinary food. It goes down like anything else— corn, mustard, yolk. But later— and it never fails— the sun turns in you. It troubles the gut. It asks to be returned. Bless that ache. Bless the fiery uprush. What rises then is not failure— only light. Effervesce! Tamar Zhghenti: Facebook Martina Nicolls RAINY DAY HEALING: Rainy Day Healing Rainy Day Healing POET IN RESIDENCE: POET IN RESIDENCE
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Monday, 1 December 2025
This is how poetry heals: discomfort, honesty, burning transformation, release
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