I don’t fit well in my body, some days
my body does not contain me, in ways
it feels as if my body’s not mine
lacking in joy and what’s divine
Like womb rejecting a coiled foetus,
my skin rejects my belonging so I fill myself up
beyond fullness, with longing
testing the boundaries of expansion
I want to love and learn how to inhabit this place
where every cell in me hungers
If you unravel me
my body speaks of scarcity
if you open me up
read the stories etched within spine, my back,
hunger in my bones, ancestral and insatiable
I fill myself until I am sick and sad
and sorry
scarcity story
star of sorrow
silent still song inside bone marrow.
To be filled yet hollow
held and unwanted
fed yet shallow
found, and by curse haunted
A body of darkness, it took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift – to expand
crossing thresholds of light
some gifts can only be found in the night
***
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
Both intimate and ultimate,
And you will be heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper
Oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two
Beautiful bodies of your lungs…
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of a single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life- just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
Still another…
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
― Mary Oliver, Evidence:Poems
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