Poetry Used To Live In A Forbidden State Of Courageous Grace
Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness
like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears
with oceans where your sorrows can learn
to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,
of the dirge and the lyric you're never going to hear
the same way twice, this mystic specificity
that encompasses us wholly in the mystery
of what we're doing here, what we're saying
and thinking and saying and feeling and shrieking and seeing here
in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere
as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew
and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us
were also in some inconceivable way, though
we can't put our lips to its eyelids, sentient
and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.
Don't live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn't write.
In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses
our human consternation of who we are and are not,
neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean
so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.
So there's lightning in the clouds of your depression
and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.
Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable
and when you enter your venerated groves
like the night wind among the crowns of the trees
be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are
and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.