The Thin Magic

The Thin Magic February 8, 2016

Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness, including thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces. I hope you enjoy this one.

THE THIN MAGICsky-at-dawn-iii

We’re just now climbing out of the

ravine and so the guard around my

heart is loosening and I cry easily.

Stillness is showing its face, again.

I almost lost you. Was forced to try

it on. Your roots, growing in my heart

for years, were ripped up by the storm.

We were hanging by a thread. But mir-

acle of the ordinary, hard skin graft of

time—we’re still here. And light is again

whispering along the empty chairs in the

park. And pigeons sit on top of store signs

watching as we die and come alive again.

A young couple now in front of me.

They’re falling into each other’s future,

not knowing what ravine they will have

to cross. It would all be despairing, if not

for the thin magic of how the light from

the beginning skips through every heart

that dares to love. The barely seeable

light that slips now up the edge of

our grief, like another dawn

we’re not quite ready for.

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you felt yourself coming alive again.


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