a poem, a practice

This week’s prompt was inspired by a conversation I had with the parents of a friend of my mother’s. The conversation took place about eight years ago in the kitchen of the house they had lived in throughout their more than 50 years of marriage. Years later, I sit here on my couch, with a laptop before me, working on a poem inspired by that conversation. Honoring the lesson, yet again, that every moment is poetry.

The poem is still a work in progress, so I will not share it today…

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I have been reading Daniel Ladinsky’s translations of poems by the Sufi poet Hafiz. Almost every day this week I have picked up the collection of poems found in The Gift and let the book flip open to a page. I read the poem that lives on that page aloud. And take a breath. And sit with it. And try to eek out all the answers I can find from it.

Today, the poem* living on the page I turned to:

When You Can Endure

When
The words stop
And you can endure the silence

That reveals your heart’s
Pain

Of emptiness
Or that great wrenching-sweet longing.

That is the time to try and listen
To what the Beloved’s
Eyes

Most want
To

Say.

Today, I began the practice my teacher gave me last Saturday.

Part of the practice is an inner-guided, silent meditation. Another part of the practice is a speaking meditation of sorts. Listening to the silence, then listening to myself as I give energy to the words that are trapped within my throat, and then coming back to the silence once again. Opening the head and the heart to something greater than me.

Today, I opened The Gift and discovered…

this poem is my practice.

*shared with permission