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.
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…
Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. by Rainer Maria Rilke As with most of Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings,…
Sometime between mindlessly loading the dishwasher and wiping the crumb-covered countertops, I make my way back— to the hickory floor beneath tired feet, to the smell of sautéing garlic and onions, to the soothing sound of end-of-summer showers. Another season, another day, slowing slipping away. I close my eyes and listen to the song that…
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the…
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas, how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s voice. Then the…
What is this meditation, then? Pure fascination with this moment, exactly as it is. Allowing everything to be. Drenching one’s present experience in curiosity. Not adding anything. Not taking anything away. No goal. No seeking. No agenda. No special state to attain. No special experience to have. Pure wonder. The extraordinary ordinariness of what is.…
My wish for you is a homecoming in this life. A coming in out of the cold; a drying off the icy rain’s touch. In the holy reliquary of childhood memory may you find there the unshakable truth of your preciousness. May you remember the cool and padded graces of your wet feet against stone.…
In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself. Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it. There…
Sunrise at the octagonal hut; beyond, where two decks meet, a lizard does pushups in the sun. I see the green, chattering world through the window, I see my image in the window. Both are present; are both true? A bee enters the hut, buzzes insistently against the window, but the window won’t yield to…
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude. If you sing…
And sometimes when I move at the edge of a greatness— a lake or a sea or a mountainside— my insignificance thrills me and the largest of my sadnesses dwindle smaller than the space between grains of sand and in that moment, knowing my place, comes a love so enormous I can love anyone, anyone,…
I carry your face in a mobile shrine and I take it out on the Underground. Your digital eyes look into mine. I change at Farringdon and I have changed. Touched by you, my skin is kozo tissue, my hair rose perfumed ink, My eyelids are gold leaf. The woman on my right, reflected in…