What comes back. What we let back in. The long slow work of re-entering our own lives.

Return

The heavy weeks pass. What's left is the small, the ordinary, the dishes. This week we practice re-entering our own lives, slowly, on purpose.

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.

The Journey

there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company

The Morning After

When I was five,
the first English word
and the longest one
I could spell
from memory
was strong.

I was so excited
I called my mother
at work.

I learned a few more words
But none of them
felt quite the same.

Now, decades later,
I find that feeling
returning
whenever scattered words
gather themselves
into poems

that reflect
versions of myself
I could never see
in the mirror.

:)