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.
“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 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 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.…
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 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…
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…
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 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…
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,…
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,…
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…