Poems can be a doorway into another world. Each one, a simple arrangement of otherwise ordinary words, that together evoke presence, wonder, possibility. So here is an invitation to pause, let the words wash over you and glimpse the world they offer you…
It’s a growing collection, and we’d love to hear which ones resonate with you and why, and find out about your favourites. Here is an index of our Words of Wonder.
Just these two words He spoke changed my life, “Enjoy Me.” What a burden I thought I was to carry – a crucifix, as did He. Love once said to me, “I know a song, would you like to hear it?” And laughter came from every brick in the street and from every pore in…
enter your sadness with open eyes curious and intrepid knowing it has purpose remove the partition between it and the beautiful and mingle its darkness with the light of time until your heart is enlarged into a great globe of being that cannot but glow by Maria Popova Maria Popova wrote this poem as a…
If every single person who has liked you in your lifetime were to light up on a map, it would create the most glitteringly beautiful network you could imagine. Throw in the strangers you’ve been kind to, the people you’ve made laugh, or inspired along the way and that star-bright web of you would be…
These days when I listen deeply to another I imagine holding a beautiful bowl in my lap. Often I chose a large Tibetan singing bowl. At other times only knotty wood will do. I embrace the round receptacle And simply hold it, A safe container That others can fill with their truth, Even when the…
You, my own deep soul, trust me, I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. What mystery breaks over me now? In its shadow I come into life. For the first time I am alone with you – you, my power to feel. by…
with the stone face. The stone heart stone hands stone feet. See in between she has also stone and does not speak. She is acting her part in the dialogue like the wind listening to wind or the wind listening to stone. Stone on wind. Wind on stone. I think you are almost sisters. I…
When the storms of life come bearing down threatening to lash you senseless, seek shelter. Find the warm blanket you caress like the felted fur of your cat curled before a glowing hearth, of breath that fills both heart and earth. Breathe. There’s always time to curse the darkness. After the tears, light a honeycomb…
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving. If this is arrogant, God, forgive me, but this is what I need to say. May what I do…
I want a word that means okay and not okay, a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all, all at once. The heart is not like a songbird singing only one note at a time, more like a Tuvan throat singer able to sing…
I garden in the soil of a song. Walk barefoot through rows of sheet music, picking strawberries from the low notes, peaches from the high notes. I feed myself a chorus, and for the first time in many months, I am full. But that’s not real, my mind demands, trusting the seedless machine. My mind repeats…
When do the hummingbirds get naps? When do they sleep? The tiny helicopter-birds, buzzing about their busy business all day long are nowhere to be found at four fifteen with dawn an hour away. When they’re at rest, they’re gone. Evaporated. They don’t exist. It’s only busyness, activity gives them their visibility, their realness in…
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. by Izumi Shikibu translated by Jane Hirshfield This poem by Izumi Shikibu, who was one of the greatest female poets of the Heian period in Japan, captures what is, I think, one of the biggest…
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day… It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. by…
You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One. You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel, to have ever neared God’s Heart at all. Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even His best musicians are not always easy to hear. So what if…
I want to give you something necessary as rain and lasting as honey, something useful as a spoon, something helpful as wheels. Sometimes it feels so inadequate to offer you a poem, a prayer, the small light of a candle, a hammock woven only of blessings. Still, as you meet these difficult hours I wish…
I had this idea and imagining it and building it brought me alive. I was never as engaged as when it was half-built. I’d read the blueprint in my heart and carve another piece. Once finished, I lived in it. It was where I’d go to look out on the world. For years it was…
I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you’re in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over. And to write music or poems about. Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the…
Make a nesting now, a place to which the birds can come, think of Kevin’s prayerful palm holding the blackbird’s egg and be the one, looking out from this place who warms interior forms into light. Feel the way the cliff at your back gives shelter to your outward view and then bring in from…
Let me be an apprentice to stillness. Let me be an open vessel filling with the vastness of each moment overflowing with every loving grieving lustful painful ecstatic aching raw sensation. Moments that birth and die contract and expand arise and dissolve. Let me embody exquisite gentleness and the strength to soften with my tendrils…
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer…
You know so very well the edge of darkness you have always carried with you. And you know too well by now the body’s hesitation at the invitation to undo everything others seemed to want to make you learn. But your edge of darkness has always made its own definition secretly as an edge of…
She speaks slowly with a voice like moss, soft, deep and damp. If you’re not listening carefully you might just miss it, rising out from the earth like vapour, gently tugging at your ankles. “Rest” she says, “Deeper. Rest as deep as I am. You are moving too fast. Become soil, become the slow-growing tree.…
Giving thanks for abundance is sweeter than the abundance itself: Should one who is absorbed with the Generous One be distracted by the gift? Thankfulness is the soul of beneficence; abundance is but the husk, for thankfulness brings you to the place where the Beloved lives. Abundance yields heedlessness; thankfulness brings alertness: hunt for bounty…
I will not regret love. I will not regret hope. I will not regret that I still love the trees and the wind song. That even through grief I have found the world generous. That even through ruin I have found solace in the blackbirds call. by Nikita Gill A strong, almost defiant poem…
Light cannot see inside things. That is what the dark is for: Minding the interior, Nurturing the draw of growth Through places where death In its own way turns into life. In the glare of neon times, Let our eyes not be worn By surfaces that shine With hunger made attractive. When we look into…
It’s not just the people who live in the city who’ve lost the thread that ties them to the woven world of stones and earth, fields alive with pollen and wings. Who among us understands how oceans rise and fall, currents swirling around the planet with messages in bottles floating on the water. When the…
You and I have spoken all these words, but as for the way we have to go, words are no preparation. There is no getting ready, other than grace…. Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. A crow sits in the blackened limbs and talks…
Wonder, Who has the magic to make the sun appear every morning? Who makes that bird on the elegant tree chirp? Breath, pulse, music, dew, sunset, the burning ambers of the fall. There is unfathomable joy in all that. Life is a stream. It flows on its own. No one knows why we are…
It’s like the scent of rain after a month of drought, the way it rises up and fills the lungs, quiets the body and gentles the mind – that’s what it’s like when, after grasping and spinning and reaching and clenching at last, exhausted with my own fear, I lay my hand on my own…
No, today probably won’t be a great day, but it absolutely won’t be a bad day either. Today will simply be a day. Twenty-four hours of a little bit of everything. Some moments will be hard, some will be joyous, some will be peaceful and some will be draining. And you, you will handle it…