A poem waits
for the mystery
in you—
girl at the window
apple blossoms, orchard
the horses you don’t own
Hope at the way station
the sail you have not found
the dance you have, as yet,
only done in dreams.

Pour in what calls,
“Let me out.”
The gift. The limb. The sun. The moon.

A poem waits
for the mystery
in you—
Pour in, pour in.
Nothing can break the delicate
glass of its
holding.
~L.L. Barkat “Delicate”

I’ll tell you a secret: poems hide.
In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping.
They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings
the moment before we wake up.
What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
— Naomi Shihab Nye

Poems were hidden from me for decades.  I was oblivious a hundred times a day to their secrets: dripping right over me in the shower,  rising over hills bright pink, tucked under a toadstool, breathing deeply as I auscultated a chest,  unfolding with each blossom, settling heavily on my eyelids at night.

The day I awoke to them was the day over twenty years ago when thousands of innocents died in sudden cataclysm of airplanes and buildings and fire — people not knowing when they got up that day it would be their last.  And such taking of life happens again and again; our world continues to weep.

Now poems don’t hide themselves as often. I begin to see, listen, touch, smell, taste as if each day would be my last. I am learning to live in a way that helps me discern the mystery and it overwhelms me. 

Poems are everywhere when I look.

And I don’t know if I have enough time left to write them all down