Need To Be True

Kimberly Burnham
1 min readApr 19, 2022

Found poetry for April 18, 2022 National Poetry Month Poetry Challenge

In Hidden Brain’s “When You Need It To Be True” Shankar Vedantam covers, “When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. This week, we bring you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality — even when the facts don’t back us up. “

Here is a series of haikus created from the words found in this podcast.

Can you see reality poetry by Kimberly Burnham, Photo by Andreas Kind on Unsplash

I Want To Tell My Story

forgiving myself
not there yet I allowed one
evil to do what

more resentment self
I allowed it believe in
comforting fictions

find reality
Leon Festinger seekers
their faith was boundless

their resistance to
disconfirmation sublime
mistakes were made me

―Found poems / blackout poetry / erasure haikus by Kimberly Burnham from Hidden Brain podcast interview between Shankar Vedantam and Liz https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/when-you-need-it-to-be-true/

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Kimberly Burnham

Writer, Poet, Ekphrastic Writer-in-Residence, Nerve Whisperer, Brain Health Coach, Author of The Traveling Brain: Illuminating Peace Poetry in 5000 Languages.