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.

The map you make yourself – Jan Richardson

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams September 1, 2026

You have looked at so many doors with longing, wondering if your life lay on the other side…

Breaking Surface – Mark Nepo

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams August 16, 2026

Let no one keep you from your journey, no rabbi or priest, no mother who wants you to dig for treasures…

King of the River – Stanley Kunitz

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams July 29, 2026

If the water were clear enough, if the water were still, but the water is not clear, the water is not still, you would see yourself, slipped out of your skin, nosing upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your belly’s blood: Finned Ego, yard of muscle that coils, uncoils.…

Grand Finale – Kim Rosen

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams July 16, 2026

Whatever it was it was all leading up to didn’t happen. Or did, but smaller. Not the page of the New Yorker memorialized behind glass with my name at the end of the poem. Or the microphone, cold friend in my hand, the sea of upturned faces, my voice cast out— changing everything. Maybe there…

Gemseed – Mark Nepo

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams July 3, 2026

Loving yourself is like feeding a clear bird no one else can see. You must be still and offer your palmful of secrets like delicate seed. As she eats your secrets no longer secret she glows and you lighten and her voice which only you can hear is your voice bereft of plans. And the…

Awareness – John Astin

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams June 19, 2026

Awareness- her gaze is so constant, our every move watched with such affection, a ceaseless vigil without condition or agenda, silent, patient, unrelenting in her embrace. There is endless room in the heart of this lover, infinite space for whatever foolishness we may toss her way. But she is also crafty, this one- a thief…

Bluebird – Charles Bukowski

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams June 6, 2026

there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and…

I am praying again, Awesome One – Reiner Maria Rilke

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams May 24, 2026

I am praying again, Awesome One. You hear me again, as words from the depths of me rush toward you in the wind. I’ve been scattered in pieces, torn by conflict, mocked by laughter, washed down in drink. I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that…

Sitting quietly – Matsua Bashō

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson May 10, 2026

Sitting quietly, doing nothing; Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. by Matsuo Bashō, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa What a simple set of words by the 17th-century Japanese haiku master Bashō, and yet what a world they open into! A world of effortlessness, of non-doing, maybe even of no doer. Which seems…

In silence – Thomas Merton

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams April 27, 2026

Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? Who (be quiet) are you (as these stones are quiet). Do not think of what you are still less of what you may…

Alliance – Maya Stein

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson April 12, 2026

“You have to make an alliance with your anguish,” he said, “not wage war against it.” And I thought of all the fists I had shaken at misfortune: games lost because the shot clock ran out, a good meal scorched in a forgotten oven, money dropped on a dress worn only once, the bully in…

Sssh – Rolf Jacobsen

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams March 29, 2026

Sssh the sea says Sssh the small waves at the shore say, sssh Not so violent, not So haughty, not So remarkable, Sssh Say the tips of the waves Crowding around the headland’s Surf. Sssh They say to people This is our earth Our eternity. by Rolf Jacobsen translated by Robert Bly When I read this poem…

The Three Goals – David Budbill

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson March 17, 2026

The first goal is to see the thing itself in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly for what it is. No symbolism, please. The second goal is to see each individual thing as unified, as one, with all the other ten thousand things. In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.…

No Voyage – Mary Oliver

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams February 27, 2026

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come And sing in the unfailing trees. On a cot by an open window I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds. Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps? Till it seemed men never go…

Deep in the mountains – Ron C. Moss

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson February 16, 2026

Deep in the mountains the road I’m lost on by Ron C. Moss I stumbled across the work of Ron C. Moss, a visual artist and poet from Tasmania, Australia who practices the Japanese art form of haiga, where a visual image is combined with a haiku. He is featured on The Awakened…

Any Morning – William Stafford

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams February 2, 2026

Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows…

Outside the Sparrows Are Awake – Nadia Colburn

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson January 19, 2026

and all the complications in my heart: I, who did not know how to love my own body, who mistook the world for a task. Listen: one voice and then another amid the rustling of the leaves. by Nadia Colburn This poem by poet and teacher Nadia Colburn is one of those where there…

I will not die an unlived life – Dawna Markova

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams January 3, 2026

I will not die an unlived life I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk…

Yes We Can Talk – Mark Nepo

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson December 22, 2025

Having loved enough and lost enough, I am no longer searching, just opening. No longer trying to make sense of pain, but trying to be a soft and sturdy home in which real things can land. These are the irritations that rub into a pearl So we can talk awhile but then we must listen,…

Snowy Night – Mary Oliver

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams December 7, 2025

Last night, an owl in the blue dark tossed an indeterminate number of carefully shaped sounds into the world, in which, a quarter of a mile away, I happened to be standing. I couldn’t tell which one it was – the barred or the great-horned ship of the air – it was that distant. But,…

Laughter came from every brick – Daniel Ladinsky

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson November 24, 2025

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…

Double-crested Cormorant – Maria Popova

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams November 10, 2025

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…

YOU – Donna Ashworth

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson October 27, 2025

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… – Martha Postlethwaite

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams October 10, 2025

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…

My own deep soul – Reiner Maria Rilke

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson September 29, 2025

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…

Stone girl – Nadia Colburn

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams September 14, 2025

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…

On Safety – Nadine Pinede

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson September 1, 2025

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 – Rainer Maria Rilke

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams August 17, 2025

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…

For when people ask – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Words of WonderBy Kristine Mackenzie-Janson August 4, 2025

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…

What’s real? – Andrea Gibson

Words of WonderBy Fay Adams July 20, 2025

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…