WORDS BY JULIE RENEE

Poetry

A place for the quiet words.

Available on Amazon

Buy on Amazon

Still Here, Still Held

Poems for Mental Health, Grief, and Becoming

By Julie Renee Bangs

This book does not promise to fix you. It promises to sit beside you.

In Still Here, Still Held, poetry becomes a place to rest when the world demands too much. Written for those navigating neurodivergence, trauma, grief, and the quiet friction of mental health struggles, this collection offers a gentle space for what hurts.

From sleepless hours and complex recovery to the particular ache of losing a companion animal, a home, or a life you thought you would have, these pages hold your exhaustion and honor your resilience.

You don’t have to have it all figured out to belong here, and you never have to explain yourself to be welcome.

THE FIRST POEM IN THIS COLLECTION

Are You Listening?

By Julie Renee Bangs

Are you listening? — the quiet between breaths is asking,
I sit beside suffering, not to fix, but to remain.
There is a weight in the room no chart can measure,
a story held in trembling hands, in unshed rain.

I have learned not to rush the holy silence,
where pain and meaning try to find a name.
To be present is a prayer without words,
a candle kept steady in wind and flame.

Some wounds speak only in whispers and distance,
some healing comes slowly, not all at once.
And still, in each broken and tender moment,
grace gathers softly, like morning sun.

So I stay, I listen, I witness, I wonder —
for every soul longs to be heard and known.
If love is anything, it is this staying,
are you listening?