Today’s poem was sent to us by Kerry Malloy.
‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you.’ – Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
It’s a difficult thing to say why you are drawn to a work of art. It is for me at least. What happens as a creative endeavor makes the long journey from inspiration, to actualization, and then somehow – finally – to and through another human being is a complicated magic. Explaining it always seems to fall short.
I like this poem.
I think because it holds my loss, my struggles, and my failures inside it but whispers back all the while that they are right and they are good.
They are worth it, the fabric of becoming.
Maybe I like it because it was given to me by a soft quiet woman who I very much adore.
I can’t be sure.
But whether in my pocket or my mind, I carry this with me often.
Kindness
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
