10 Poems To Make You Feel Stronger
We all have strength and depth beyond what we know, although in the face of challenges it can be hard to remember, and harder still to access. Sometimes we need a reminder, a way to access that part of ourselves. A poem can be like a divining rod, quivering and pointing to the deep well of you. These poems may help you locate your strength.
1.
TECTONIC
You could say we are adrift,
but only if we were separate.
You could fear the random ruptures
or see the land answering its own call.
The solid ground you walk on rides a mantle
moved by its own shapeless heat.
There is fire in the belly.
You boil with an urge to express
and a heat that cares nothing
for your tidy arrangements.
Land reinvents itself, rising up,
creating new places to stand,
taking down the old—
the known sacrificed for the new, again and again.
Secure your life as much as you like.
Take a snapshot.
Today’s landscape is no match for your burning core.
Your past is no match for the mountain
2.
WHAT LIES WAITING
I’m not interested in
what you do
or don’t do for a living.
I want to know
what wants to come through you,
what lies waiting?
Who are you
that you haven’t met yet?
And what colour will you paint your life?
3.
THE HEART OF FEAR
In the heart of fear
lies fearlessness.
In the eye of the hurricane,
stillness presides.
Nothing can wipe out your centre,
that axis on which your world turns.
Here, blue sky reigns,
and quiet travels with you.
To reside here is not to deny the storm,
but to see its lashing rain,
witness its violent strength
and feel peace, still.
4.
YOUR WORDS
Your words, a candle
on a bare wooden sill,
talisman
against the baying night.
It is not your honesty
that makes me a moth
to your flame
but that you
set it in your window.
Even as your truth
splutters in the breeze
it says
I am not afraid.
5.
WILDS
Where are your wilds?
What have you tamed
and let others tame in you?
What longs to unravel,
run barefoot and free,
loosened
and limbered
and fleet?
6.
THE BEGINNER
To be spring again,
arriving in a world
wet, green and electric.
To throw yourself
at the unknown,
to stand on new legs
in a wide field,
wobbly, but there,
to know nothing of the world
but what you encounter
each moment,
to have only instinct,
no default—
what a thrill!
What a thrill to be new
over and over
in one life.
The Beginner is also available as a letterpress print here.
7.
where your wild is
Where your wild is
I can’t tell you where the hawk is
but I can tell you where it’s not.
It’s not where swamp hens
lazily cross the field,
nor where rabbits idly graze.
There is no hawk circling
where the duck sleeps head under wing,
nor where starlings settle in trees.
The hawk is not in sight
if magpies calmly eye the sky.
If the ground is silent
no hawk is nearby.
I can’t tell you where your wild is
but I can tell you where it’s not.
It’s not where your senses lay idle,
or where you walk unaroused,
instead—
look where your guard dog bristles
smelling the risk scented air,
note when your insides quiver,
hairs rise, eyes tear.
Pay heed to your heart,
and its cavernous roar,
as your wild quietly circles,
crying more,
more.
8.
the invitation
When you least expect it
you may find yourself back there again—
old thoughts, old hurts, alive once more.
What you thought was healed
seems open and sore again.
Remember, you have done this work,
you have settled that past,
healing and wholing has happened,
and you can choose—
go there again, or
Step back from that edge,
feel your bodily no,
press palms with something new.
Come, meet your power,
ask—what do I want instead?
9.
when life brings you to an edge
let yourself be sharpened,
let fall what is falling away.
See what remains.
Let yourself be sharpened
and question not
where the arrow now points.
10.
new ground
A river will bite
at the bank that bars its way.
Backed up against the wall of itself,
like our own self welling up,
it insists on change.
The once gentle
shuffling of stones and
spreading of sand is replaced with
energy hurled at the sides
of an outgrown self.
It can look, and feel, violent
to protest the bank,
to press back on that which
blocks us,
but let’s not judge.
Whatever the river does,
whether push, rush, rest or glide,
you never hear it condemn itself
for the need
to carve new ground.
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