Trying to Understand Poetry

I grew up thinking poems followed a few very simple rules. The biggest rule, at least in my mind, was that poems had to rhyme. I did not question it. That idea had been planted so early that it felt like basic common sense, the way you assume pancakes are round or that dogs like bones. The first poems I ever heard were nursery rhymes. My mother used to say them while cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall" was one I remember clearly because she always tapped the counter when she said the word fall. I did not know what a wall like that looked like. I did not know who Humpty Dumpty was supposed to be. But the rhythm and the rhyme stuck in my head. Later in school, poems worked the same way. Teachers handed out short poems with neat little rhymes at the end of each line. Cat rhymed with hat. Tree rhymed with bee. If you had asked ten year old me what poetry meant, I would have said something like, "It is when the last words match." Nobody ever said this rule