Poetry for a Pandemic with David Whyte

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David Whyte is a poet, author, and organizational speaker known for his keen ability to put words to the ways of the human heart. The following poem from The Bell and the Blackbird, although written some time ago, seems to speak to the current transitional space that we may be finding ourselves in. Find a quiet place to read the poem, more than once if possible.

 

CLEAVE by David Whyte

To hold together and to split apart

at one and the same time,

like the shock of being born,

breathing in this world

while lamenting for the one we’ve left.


No one needs to tell us

we are already on our onward way,

no one has to remind us

of our everyday and intimate

embrace

with disappearance.


We were born saying goodbye

to what we love,

we were born

in a beautiful reluctance,

not quite ready

to breathe in this new world,

we are here and we are not,

we are present while still not

wanting to admit we have arrived.


Not quite arrived in our minds

yet always arriving in the body,

always growing older

while trying to grow younger,

always in the act

of catching up,

of saying hello

or saying goodbye

finding strangely,

in each new and imagined future

the still-lived memory

of a previous,

precious life.

 

For reflection:

How do you find yourself in an “embrace with disappearance?”

Where are you arriving and where are you catching up?