Day 18: Listen

a poem a day in the month of may

Friends,

Today’s word is listen, and today my word, listen, is about one thing: my body, my being.

I didn’t start listening to my precious body’s voice until I was almost in my 30s. Maybe I heard the voice, but I wasn’t really listening.

It reminds me of this gorgeous song by Angie McMahon, this gorgeous song about someone looking at themselves in the mirror and choosing to “every inch of this body”

Here’s a video if you’d like to listen:

You told me something precious that day,
standing at the kitchen counter, when I 
finally made the connection between me
and you, between Me and Me, between
the pain I’d been feeling for years and the
therapy that finally helped me listen.


There, standing at the kitchen counter, I 
held you closer to me, you, my lower belly,
my back, my precious mind, my hands and
moles and tender heart, my irritable bowels
and my tired shoulders that have stayed
up by my precious ears for far too long.

I decided there that I listen, a listening
from the guttural depths, from the spaces
where I’ve been waiting in the darkness
to finally be reconnected to you, where 
I’ve been looking with a searchlight for
my own body, you, my precious partner 
in this tender, long, beautiful life—
I’m listening.


Speak.