Each morning, I read poems — sometimes, a single drop of a poem that widens and ripples through my life all day; sometimes, a dancing river of poems that sweeps me towards a glimmering horizon.
Poems restore my soul, return me to my beating heart, to my breath and body. They deliver me home to the lineage of bards and poets who sang around hearth-fires and campfires, who loved the everyday world and told of its mysteries in ancestral caves, and whispered their songs down the mouths of sacred wells.
Here’s an excerpt from Eavan Boland’s poem, A Habitable Grief, that rings like a pebble flung into a great, copper vat, this morning:
“This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this
which hurts
just enough to be a scar.
And heals just enough to be a nation.”
This is soul food. Drink it in. Let it settle into your cells, into your hungry bones. Feel the golden nourishment of truth, eloquently spoken.