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.
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…