It is still possible to be kind to yourself,
to drop constraints and fall often
to your knees, it’s not too late now, to bow
to what beckons, the world still swimming
around you as you kneel transfigured
by what sweeps on, it’s still possible
to leave every fearful former self
in the wake of newly-heard words
issuing from an astonished mouth.
It’s still possible to feel your body
as fully here and fully you, but not
quite your own, to find you can live
both entirely as yourself and in
the lovely anonymous multitude
of elements around you, that you
have always been a brother and sister
to the clouds beyond the window;
or have lived your secret, unspoken
marriage with the pale blue sky
for more years than you could ever
remember; and that you have always
been proud to be, through all
your difficulties, a loyal companion
and friend to the foaming tide,
coming and going, appearing
and disappearing with you,
and for you, day after day
on the ceaseless shore.
It’s still possible amongst all the never-ending
movement to hold the necessary anchorage,
while having a mind for the long migration,
to be ready to up and go and then surprisingly,
be gone.
It’s not too late to imagine that the days
to come are the lost children you are still
to bring to birth and bring to maturity,
and that you are ready once more to be
selfless on their behalf, setting them to rights
when they fall, listening when they lose
faith, being that mother or father,
who through all their difficulties,
gives the gift of constant witness.
It’s still possible to intuit a magnificent,
individual arrival, that brings you still
closer to the accompanying faraway crowd;
to live bravely and always, as someone said,
to the point of tears, to realize that you
have always had your life shattered
and your heart broken and your faith
tested by loving too much and too often
and that all along, it was never too much
and never too often, and that you were
never, ever, fully broken.
No, it’s still possible to feel that spring
is in the air, to intuit these days
as pilgrim days: that these are mornings
for setting out and setting off,
early hours when new stories
have already begun, mornings
to understand that you are now living
fully in some secret parallel
where you can just as well
go anywhere by going nowhere,
when you can stay at home
and find in any given hour or day,
in the quiet kitchen, the just culmination
of a practiced sincerity, when you can learn
the daily minutiae of giving up
and giving in; the beautiful but necessary
fasting into submission, of resting
through not doing, or not eating
or not hating, or not taking, or not
judging too quickly, of learning how easily
you can free yourself and how easily you can
forget who needed to be impressed
and who needed to be punished,
and most of all, recounting who you
needed to forgive so bravely, for hurting
you so deeply: yes, to practice every day,
the difficult art of being proudly abstemious
but disarmingly generous; of learning
to entertain the unsettling truth;
that from the very beginning, through all
your difficulties, you have been learning
to pass on every single thing you ever earned
and every single thing you never fully
deserved, back to those who have
never found it in their power to receive.
Yes, it’s still possible not to hold so tightly
to what you think is true, to bend your head
and assume humility beneath the eaves
of a still spreading sky, to feel in the rain
upon your upturned face, how you have
always been friends with the distant
horizon, no matter how far and how
faint its call.
Yes, it’s still possible to be a soul
on its way to a beautiful, beckoning
and bountiful somewhere,
looking for the gift you will bring back
to the time of your birth, so that
you can start living again, from the very
first moment you came into this life,
but this time with the cleaner, earned
simplicity of knowing what it has taken
you so long to learn: to ask for forgiveness
by being forgiveness: to live more
generously, by greeting yourself
more generously, and then to dance
more bravely, to speak more suddenly,
and with a free heart, to undo as you go
all you do wrong, and to right the wronged
and unsettle the self-righteous, sharing
the secret to happiness with everyone.
Yes, oh yes, it’s still possible to taste
the natural God-given sweetness
in every cloud in the sky, in every little
you eat; in every breath that you take,
in every hand that you touch, in every day
that you wake, in every tear that you shed,
in every voice still waiting to call you,
in every once solid, immoveable door,
now calling you through; and in every
single blessed moment turning to the next.
It’s still possible to fully understand
you have always been the place
where the miracle has happened:
that you have been since your birth
the bread given and the wine lifted,
the change witnessed and the change itself,
that you have been all along,
a goodness that can continue
to be a goodness to itself.
It’s still possible in the end
to realize why you are here
and why you have endured,
and why you might have suffered
so much, so that in the end,
you could witness love, miraculously
arriving from nowhere, crossing
bravely as it does, out of darkness,
from that great and spacious stillness
inside you, to the simple,
light-filled life of being said.
-from Still Possible
I wrote the title poem to the collection 'Still Possible' in parallel to all the other poems that grew into the book. The poem felt like a narrative tide carrying me along and in joining that tide every day I felt as if I was being swept along by forces greater than my everyday identity. It's meant to be read in th same almost breathless way in which it was written. Always 'Still Possible' but always, always, always in ways we can never fully imagine.... DW
I wrote the title poem to the collection 'Still Possible' in parallel to all the other poems that grew into the book. The poem felt like a narrative tide carrying me along and in joining that tide every day I felt as if I was being swept along by forces greater than my everyday identity. It's meant to be read in th same almost breathless way in which it was written. Always 'Still Possible' but always, always, always in ways we can never fully imagine.... DW
So many points of awakening. I’ll settle on this one for now:
“… to realize that you
have always had your life shattered
and your heart broken and your faith
tested by loving too much and too often
and that all along, it was never too much
and never too often, and that you were
never, ever, fully broken.”
🙏🏻