Un-earthed

You put one foot in front of the other and use poetry to remind you of the beautiful things you must do in your life. Last night, as I sat at the dining table with the warmth of family around me, I recalled these three poems, three small things, like fragments of shells which I had forgotten, discarded somewhere, along a beach I had gleaned them, collected them and on that day in a summer long past, when I was young and everything was possible, I put them in my pocket.

Then I forgot about them. Along the years I had left them in the back of a drawer. To be pushed behind the children’s socks, the piles of washing, the unmet needs, the mounds of used tissues, the dry crumbs that came off tables where I waited and waited.

And then, yesterday, these three poems, which I had never seen before unearthed themselves before me and in the knocking of the bones against mine, something was awoken. Memory began with a soft sweet call and then it became louder and louder – like the empress listening to the nightingale in the damp night air.

And I remember and dare now to live again. The music, the poetry, the possibility. The adventure of looking forward, of making plans. Of laughing and daring to laugh as loudly as possible. To scream from the roof of the world, how I do I love the world. To now look forward to never growing old but becoming wise, to tell a story that is about life itself.

Those three magic fragments, those three magic bones, the three white discarded calcified beads – dissolving into my life to illuminate what may be, once again.