Recovery Poems for April

April is Poetry Month so,

“Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.” --Christian Wiman

For this Poetry Month I’ll be adding some poems about recovery, and growth and changing our lives. I hope you’ll make them part of your meditation and that you will share them too.

We begin with Mary Oliver who writes in “The Journey” about the experience that many of us had that got us here: The Journey

One day you finally knew


what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting
their bad advice-


though the whole house

began to tremble


and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,


though their melancholy
was terrible.


t was already late
enough,

and a wild night,


and the road full of fallen
branches

and stones.
But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice


which you slowly
recognized as your own,


that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper


into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do

--
determined to save
the only life you could save.