Poem 352 & 353 – Hands On & I Asked Emily Dickinson Her Thoughts on Isolation…

Poem 352

Hands On

when Everything feels meaningless
(& by that I mean Everything hurts too much to feel any of it)
go outside & put your hands on a tree trunk
then look up at its naked branches
garnishing the grey sky like a post-script

you will experience the calming energy of Significance
your place in the moment
unconditionally loved by
something Big & Alive

Everything inside you will illuminate
because you are made of stars
& your galaxy of meaning is
extraordinary & necessary

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Poem 353

I Asked Emily Dickinson Her Thoughts on Isolation & This Is What She Told Me

…Beneath my thinking three I am alone but not lonely…
When Death passed me by…I gathered him in my poetry
and we spoke of Living…Trees and Death and poetry are
Isolation’s companions…Be wild with them! Be gentle too…
We attend our own funerals by stepping into each Day
like a flower smiling toward her sun…

*

A name is but a holder
A body but a place
Isolation may feel colder
So be heated by Love’s grace

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I missed yesterday’s poem. Goodness. With a mere twelve days left in this, two-thousand and twenty-first year, I feel the weight of writing a daily poem so differently than I did when I began 353 days ago. I am a jumble of thoughts, wishes, worries, reflections, reasons and ramblings…and my body knows it’s time to stop almost everything so I can write. I wake up in the morning and feel one way…fifteen minutes later, I feel another. I find I’m grateful that my head is attached to my body. I find that even though it is, it has a waning connection to my heart. I must handle this. And so, in the spirit of the full Moon in Gemini (urging me to take time to reflect, to trust that I am Enough, to celebrate the hard work achieved throughout the year), and the Winter Solstice (December 21, 2021), I will be folding inward, deeply. I will be burrowing into the ‘stillness beneath the blankets of snow’…even if there’s no snow on the ground just yet…the burrowing has begun.

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At the Winter Solstice, the wind is cold, trees are bare and all lies in stillness beneath blankets of snow.

Gary Zukov

So thank you, friends, for your patience as I struggle, strive, squeeze and slide into the final days of this year.

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