A Good Book: Day 22
a poem a day in the month of may
I am really excited to read your poems for today’s prompt, which is a good book.
What does a good book do for us, how does it ground us and steady us in heavy times?
There are at least twelve books piled around me on this couch, and I’ve gathered them like a mother gathers her children, like God gathers us when we feel scattered and alone. Worlds of wisdom lay beside me, deep wells that I draw from when I’m tired and thirsty, a connection from my soul to the soul of another, a space to rest my weary mind and let someone else fill it with the love it so desperately seeks. A good book is a lifeline, a balm, a salve, the best of them aware of the medicine they bring into the world around them, into the readers who gather their lives up on comfortable couches hoping to find themselves and maybe to find the heartbeat of God in the process.
“Look, we are not unspectacular things,” said Ada
as James noticed how “our grief gave off a slight glimmer”
Jess held your hands with “the dirt of your motherland
unapologetic beneath your nails,” and when you didn’t
know what to do next, Cathryn said
“the seeds remember everything they need”
So you gave yourself to the soil
“The dark will be your womb tonight,” said David
as Mary whispered, “imagine! imagine! the long and
wondrous journeys still to be ours”
And all those words turned like
compost inside you, revitalizing
until you found your voice again
clear and beautiful and buoyant
and when you sang, January was there
reaching out to you,
coffee in hand, saying
“Let us take this joy to go”
***
When I'm stuck, reaching for a poetry book often helps me find my way again. I wrote this with lines from some of my favorite poems, and I found that pulling books off my shelf this morning and imagining a conversation with all these poets brought a kind of sparkle and sense of connection to my morning ✨
Here are the poems and their authors:
Dead Stars, by Ada Limon
Made Visible, by James Crews
You Are Inseparable, by Jess Housty
Summer Apples, by Cathryn Essinger
Sweet Darkness, by David Whyte
Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me, by Mary Oliver
In the Company of Women, by January Gill O’Neil
I still remember
At five years old
Sitting cross-legged on the bed
And for the first time
Connecting the letters to sounds
The sounds to words
And to the worlds beyond
How they all stared up at me
From the pages
I still remember
The creaking sound
Of the 70-year-old
Ladder to the attic above
Where my mother revealed
More treasure: more words
More worlds of
Alcott, Lee, Silverstein, E.B. White
And others I was too young
To understand fully
Still I knew I had discovered
The secret, a vision
What my own world could become.