For many years I resisted the way things fall apart. I made a life out of holding things together… I believed that poetry could work as a kind of glue, could help me to fix problems, could help me to know. But then, about two years ago, the world helped things fall apart so completely that I was able, at least for a moment, to see through my longing to make things neat. I could see through my desire to control the world. Since then, poems have become more a way of unknowing. I come to the page with curiosity instead of answers. Rilke writes in “Autumn,” about how this experience of surrender can lead us into “seeing” god: “ And yet there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.” This poem is about my ongoing practice of allowing the world to be as it is without trying to reshape or recreate it. Oh World I Love You Oh world, I love you, you with your roots that thrust up through pavement, you with your mudflows ...
Women's Spiritual Poetry