I can feel in my bones this moment 15 years ago, freshly delivered of my second tiny babe. That tender mama sits halfway between the age my daughter has become, and the age I am now. Oh time, beautiful and terrifying friend!
I’m aware of the world’s unraveling, and also: standing amongst five hundred robins flocking and singing along the Rio Grande; the way my breath merges with my patients’ breath when I check vital signs at the hospital and we merge for a moment; walking through the shifting light over the course of a day, light that is like a great ark I climb aboard, or a book whose only line reads, We will survive this season, we will be changed by it, we will change the world during it.
I am making a little book of collages as a visual arts practice, writing as wildly as I can as I compose my own version of Four Quartets which has me drawing from the deep well of female mystics, and also being inspired by the Divine Imagination by keeping my tiny toe stuck into that river.
A handful of the more photogenic books that fight for my attention these days–all so good. Annie’s book Singing Under Snow wins my favorite book of the winter award, as well as best collection of love poems to mothers, lovers, fungi, and the wild. I am not sure I have ever cried so much over a collection of poetry. It is one of those books that makes a poet want to renew their vows to poetry forever, just to continue the practice in order to see what unexpected wonder might come next, like a handful of chanterelles popping up when the conditions are just right.
Here is a poem from late fall I included in a little chapbook called Archive of Lives Left Behind . It was generously created when I participated in a local reading series called Floating Words.
Keep playing your song, friends. Underline what you love. Be well.
Kyce Bello 