I first set up Rhymes To Remember with just a Facebook page back in 2017. If I’m honest, I set up the page initially with a view of “let’s just see what happens”. At this point, I had only ever written poems for friends and family. Whilst every one of them had said that I was very talented and should take my writing further, I still lacked the confidence and self-belief that I actually could.
To set the scene a little more…up until my eldest daughter was born I worked as a lecturer in medical statistics. I wrote scientific research papers, grant applications and course material for clinicians and students. It couldn’t have been further from poetry!
Thinking back, the only poem I remember ever writing before this point was when I was eighteen years old. My cousin passed away suddenly aged just nineteen and I wanted to voice how I was feeling in a way that would commemorate him. So without really giving it much thought I wrote a reading for the funeral. I simply put down my emotions on paper and this was the result…
It was another emotional period of my life that re-ignited this creativity. As a new mum I think I felt every possible emotion – joy, sadness, fear, elation – and most of them within the space of a few hours! I was tired and I had absolutely no idea how to process everything. Then one day, when my daughter was around ten weeks old, I started to write. I wrote this poem….
The next day I wrote another poem. Then again the following week. And so it continued. It wasn’t until a few months later that I realised what I had actually been creating – a truly personal and unique way to remember all the small things about my daughter. All the things that I would otherwise have forgotten thanks to the fog of motherhood. It was this realisation that actually gave me the inspiration for the name “Rhymes To Remember” further down the line.
Eventually, I shared some of these poems with friends and family and from then on the requests for bespoke poems started rolling in. It was my ability to draw on my own life experiences that enabled me to relate to each individuals unique story and create something that really resonated with them.
And so with the encouragement from friends and family, along with my belief that my words had the potential to make an impact in the lives of individuals, I set up that Facebook page. Now here I am three years later with over five hundred poems to my name and I’m sure there are many more to come!
All of my poems and quotes are protected under Copyright ©️ Sally R. Wilkes of Rhymes To Remember and are registered with The UK Copyright Service. They may not be reproduced in any form without my written permission.
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