Books That Built Me: Heartsongs
On discovering a poet whose work I'd be reading for the rest of my life.
I didn’t know who he was. Just a bright-eyed, soft-spoken, curious kid at the summer camp for young people with disabilities that I was working at. We crossed paths only briefly, sharing a conversation about nature, poetry, and the strange beauty of small things. He liked that I wrote poems. I liked how deeply he listened. He asked about my name, and told me it suited someone who saw the world from unusual angles.
Only later did I realise I’d met a poet whose work I'd be reading for the rest of my life.
His name was Mattie Stepanek.
He died on July 14th 2004, aged just thirteen. Afterwards, the camp director gave us each a copy of one of his poetry books, Heartsongs, a quiet tribute to a short life that had already touched so many. I was stunned. I’d spoken to someone extraordinary and hadn’t known it at the time. I read the book in one sitting.
A year later, Mattie's family released Reflections of a Peacemaker, the full collection of Mattie's works, which I bought on release day and have been reading ever since.
I was 18 when I met Mattie. I wasn’t new to poetry, I’d been writing it for years but hadn’t yet worked out how to be open on the page. Reading his poems changed that. They were clear and raw and gentle, often no longer than a few lines, but they landed like small truths wrapped in stardust. His work gave me permission to be vulnerable, to be sincere, to write simply when I needed to.
I still have that original copy. It’s worn and underlined and full of notes in pencil.
On good days and bad ones, I’ll find myself reaching for it. His poem When the Trees Sing brings me a kind of peace I can’t explain. So does this quote:
“If you have enough breath to complain about anything, you have more than enough reason to give thanks about something.”
It lives on a post-it near my desk, a grounding reminder that, in a cruel and ruthless world, it's radical to be unfailingly kind.
Mattie was the first young person I knew who died. His poems helped me process that loss, and years later, when my six-year-old nephew Sebastian died, I turned to them again. His writing didn’t try to fix grief — it just made space for it. And that, in itself, was healing.
He also changed how I write. Some of the more whimsical, emotive poems in Counterweights, like Thoughts on Takeoff, exist because I saw Mattie’s work and thought, “Oh! You’re allowed to do that!” He made me braver, softer, more honest on the page. He showed me that you don’t need to follow any rules, you just need to mean it.
Every now and then I still take one of Mattie's books off the shelf and thumb through its pages at random. It’s the kind of book that feels like a conversation. A quiet voice reminding you that love is possible and peace is within our grasp, even when the world feels hard and scary and unrelenting.
If you’ve never read poetry before, or think it isn’t for you, this is the book I’d hand you. Because it isn’t about form or polish. It’s about truth. It’s about hope. And it was written by someone who saw more of life than most of us ever do, in spite of having so much less of it.
Heartsongs is one of the Books that Built Me. There are so many more to tell you about. Until next time...
