Poetry
Returning to Ourselves
Poems about listening to our inner voice, remembering what is true, and finding our way home to ourselves.
A collection of poems that offer resonance and companionship, inviting us to pause, reflect and listen more deeply to our inner lives.
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The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved youall your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. -
They forgot to tell me too
that there was always this whistle,
this reed, making quiet music.
It moved like a woman
making her way
through a crowd
like a ship tacking
this way and that
on the sea.
It was the beginning of me
and the very me of me
and I became a stranger to it.
But when the mountain came tumbling down,
I knelt at a window and wept.
A small bird, blue like skylight
offered me milk and cookies
and sang into my weeping.
Then I fell into the hammock of the ancient moon
and a book began to write itself.
The pen was my keeper
and the page was my face
and the craft was yours, my god.
Dreamkeeper, Sleepweaver, Elegance of all:
I kneel to you. I sew your skin.
I wait at the road for your arrivals.
I return. I return. I return. -
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Rest, Grounding & the Body
Poems that invite us to pause, soften and return to the wisdom of the body and the natural world.
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Your tiredness has dignity to it! Do not rush to pathologize it or push it away, for it may contain great intelligence, even medicine.
You have been on a long journey from the stars, friend. Bow before your tiredness now; do not fight it any longer.
There is no shame in admitting that you cannot go on. Even the courageous need to rest.
For a great journey lies ahead. And you will need all your resources.
Come, sit by the fire of Presence. Let the body unwind; drop into the silence here. Forget about tomorrow, let go of the journey to come, and sink into this evening’s warmth.
Every great adventure is fueled by rest.
Your tiredness is noble, friend, and contains healing power … if you would only listen ..
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Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you. -
I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
Grief, Healing & the Sacred Dark
Poems that accompany sorrow, tenderness and the slow movement towards healing.
Wild Belonging & Wholeness
Poems that remind us of our belonging—to nature, to one another and to the many parts of ourselves.
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Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. -
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins,thrown by those who wished for something else.
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When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.The dark will be your home
tonight.The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learnanything or anyone
that does not bring you aliveis too small for you.
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Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
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She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth—
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebrationwhere the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it’s you she receives.You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking centre of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.