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.…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…