Poems for Healing

Healing is an honor,

Though perhaps one wrapped in darkness,

Like a star is.

Jennifer Williamson

Today on the blog, three poems of healing for difficult times.

little prayer

by Danez Smith

let ruin end here

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing    

& if not     let it be

Revenant

by Meena Alexander

This disease has come back

With frills and furbelows.

You must give your whole life to poetry

Only a few survive if that—

Poems I mean, paper crumpled

Shades of another water—

Far springs are what you long for,

Listening for the slow drip of chemicals

Through a hole in your chest.

If you were torn from me

I could not bear what the earth had to offer.

To be well again, what might that mean?

The flowering plum sprung from late snow,

Ratcheting trill in the blackberry bush

Blood streaks, pluck and throb of mercy.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.