It's 3 a.m. and I've just spent the past half hour rocking my son Theo back to sleep. This week he's learned how to pull himself up to standing, and this has him so excited that he's been unable to settle down when he wakes in the night.
Since Theo's birth seven months ago, time has blurred to a single, endless day that progresses in two-hour increments of waking and sleeping. Being present enough to safely care for my dear son when every atom of my being is craving unconsciousness--night after night after night--is (after giving birth) physically and emotionally the hardest thing I've done. This is where poetry comes in.
I've been appreciating lately how my lifelong practice of poetry has trained me to sit with my discomfort and be curious about it. Instead of repressing or avoiding, I've learned to move into the center of the ache and get familiar whatever awaits me there. In this way, writing poetry has been for me like driving through a storm. With my rubber to the road, when lightning strikes I can give all of that energy safe grounding.
Writing my way through turbulence over the years has cultivated in me the quiet to be with my son now and find what is shining through the dull film of exhaustion. To study the heavying shape of his earnest little body curved to fit mine. To breathe into his thirst as my body empties into his. To inhabit fully the gift of each word as it arrives.




