Take a breath now, while you can. While you're in a safe place, well-fed and warm. While you have clean clothes hanging in the closet, folded in your dresser drawers. While the snow is outside and you are inside. While the skies are empty except for darkening clouds. There's a thief in our house. He's disarmed the system of alarms we thought we had in place. All the doors are unlocked now. This isn't a drill or a black-and-white movie from the 1940s. Take a breath now, and gather your strength. Feel the love of those who love and depend on you. The future is waiting to see what we decide to do, and whether we find the courage to defend the rights of everyone to live their life, to love who they love, to partake of the feast and embrace their dreams. The future is waiting to gauge the breadth of our embrace, our ability to act selflessly for the good of our entire planet, our green-and-blue Earth that gave birth to all of Nature, overflowed with senseless beauty, given us the ability to see with moral clarity and grow, if we dare, to be braver and wiser than we ever thought we'd be called to be. We who were living our lives as if everything we thought mattered really mattered. Let us raise our voices now, while we can. This is the turn our lives have taken. Let us listen to those who study history, to those who practice wisdom and understand what it means to act collectively: who can teach us the ways of bees and trees and the networks of mushrooms, our biological cousins, that grow and thrive underground.
On January 23rd, I had the great privilege of being interviewed live at the Library of Congress for Grace Cavalieri’s long-running podcast, “The Poet and the Poem.”
You can listen here:
Brilliant! I love this poem! ~ ci
It's a gorgeous poem for a needful time. xx