📝 Poetry¶
Estimated time to read: 2 minutes
If you're here looking for poetry by Helen Mar Kimball, you'll find it over here.
If you're here looking for poetry that I wrote, you'll be disappointed.
I'll add things here as I encounter them, and find them compelling.
Wild Geese¶
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Veiled¶
Heaven is out of focus, looks hazy behind the obedience woven into a layer of synthetic organza. The women will veil their faces, an order that comes from a voice I’ll only ever hear outside myself, a name I’ll never own sitting just behind my teeth.
They’ll connect me with the angels, but they can’t tell me who is who. I’ll arrive meekly at the throne of grace with bruises on my hipbones, stifling loud laughter and louder grief because I could never quite see where I was going, clutching diamonds in my palm a crown I’ve never worn because I refused to learn to balance it on a head that’s always bowed.
The throne room is too quiet. A stranger pulls me into the beyond where it looks just like it did before. Eyes to see what it is, as it is.
Coward.
I do not have to call you God if you cannot look me in the eye.
— Madeline Thatcher @missmadiejean