Who needs poetry?

Whenever the question "Does poetry have a social function?" is raised, I have to argue that poetry is central to our civilisation because it makes us think. When the purveyors of bottom-line thinking puts a price tag on everything from  a mountain to a river, poetry reminds us that they are more than items on a spreadsheet. Not everything that counts can be counted.

There are poems that, in their subtle but powerful way, reveal to us areas of our own experiences that, for reasons both personal and societal, we had lost sight of, forever changing the way we look at and listen to the world. It is this possibility that makes poetry as necessary as a paycheck.

To read "No one leaves home unless /home is the mouth of a shark" by the Nairobi-born, London-raised, 24-year-old Warsan Shire, is to be reminded not just of the futility and the horror of war but also of the helplessness of people. Referring to the unthinkable choices refugees must take, Shire writes: "No one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land."

Bevies of new research show that reading poetry develops empathy. There are personal, apolitical lyrics that make us think again about the dynamics of our day-to-day relationships with beings, from humans to the wild things that we keep forgetting are out there, where the chaos ends.

A poet wants to say so much in so few words. That's the beginning of restraint. When Carl Sandburg writes, "The fog comes/on little cat feet," in just seven words, he gives life to a natural phenomenon endowing it with character. Students of all forms of writing could benefit from taking into account this indispensable dimension of well-chosen words. Baudelaire invites us to be poets even in prose.

"Nothing is more important to the future of humanity than the freedom to make new ideas," says Dorothea Lasky, poet and faculty at Columbia School of Arts. "I would argue that the act of writing poetry is important for the creation of those new ideas."

In Iran, school children are taken to the grave of Hafez on a regular basis where they show respect to the late poet and philosopher. Why don't we bring Nazrul or Tagore into the lives of our children?

Plenty of things need to happen in the world and in this country, like putting a stop to invading countries for oil, reducing inequality and establishing the rule of law. Can poetry make that happen?

Poet Robert Bly addressed this concern in a conversation with Bill Moyers, journalist and former White House Press Secretary in the Johnson administration. "No, it's never been able to do anything of that sort. It merely speaks to the soul, so the soul can remember—so it's quite proper to have all the poems against the war. And it's proper not to be disappointed if nothing changes."

Why must we read or write it then?

Well, ask the Guantanamo prisoner that, who, when denied pen and paper, used pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups. If he sought "a momentary stay against confusion," and found it in poetry, I would say, job well done. Healing is not the domain only of prescriptive drugs. In fact, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) directs to the scientific evidence of the efficacy of poetry for the healing of patients, including those suffering from brain cancer.

There's more.

John Coleman, in the article The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals in the Harvard Business Review makes the case for hiring poets as managers because poets are original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex problems and are able to come up with simple solutions.

Even the sciences have deeply-rooted relationships with poetry. Scientists in the pre-Socrates era wrote in verse. Erasmus Darwin's poem The Temple of Nature outlined a theory of evolution. Einstein calls mathematics "the poetry of logical ideas."

Poetry is what language alone can do. In a two-line, poem called To You, Whitman asks two rhetorical questions:

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?

And why should I not speak to you?

It seems entirely self-evident to Whitman that two strangers passing each other ought to be able to loiter and speak, to connect, and even become friends. How often do we pass someone we know - let alone a stranger - without even looking?

In January 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson's firstborn child, Waldo, died of scarlet fever at the age of five. He had "touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household." When the nine-year-old Louisa came to his house to ask about Waldo, all Emerson could say was "Child, he is dead."

Child, he is dead. In 2015, it's Aylan.

The writer is an engineer-turned-journalist.