Sarah Crossan

Whenever something awful happens, particularly when I lose something I didn’t want to lose, I feel an ugly sense of injustice. What I admire about Naomi Shahab Nye’s poem is the ways in which she draws loss as a gift. Once we hit rock bottom, we will know and appreciate kindness.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow

We tend to see the endings of things as the only thing that was – but life is about the entire journey. Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell, yes. But Icarus flew. And that is not failure

When I am lost, my instinct is to try to find a way back on to the path I was following. Wagoner suggests a different method: ‘Stand still.’ I guess if we want to find a way out of a forest or a painful situation, the first thing we must do is acknowledge that we are lost. And then listen to what’s happening around us so we can get our bearings

Sarah Crossan
How can we know which days
will be the turning points?
So long as we live,
we gamble.
Red.
Black.
Put it all on Number 11

‘Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.’

Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.*
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand

Abigail Cook
And when they try
to clip your wings,
tell you
to sit down, shut up:
rise.
When they tell you
you are too much this way
and too little that way:
rise.
Remember you are falcon bones
and phoenix wings,
so fly.
You are worthy

Ha Jin
You must hold your quiet center,
where you do what only you can do.
If others call you a maniac or a fool,
just let them wag their tongues.
If some praise your perseverance,
don’t feel too happy about it –
only solitude is a lasting friend.
You must hold your distant center.
Don’t move even if earth and heaven quake.
If others think you are insignificant,
that’s because you haven’t held on long enough.
As long as you stay put year after year,
eventually you will find a world
beginning to revolve around you.*

Mary Oliver
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