Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly
Let it cut more deep
Let it ferment and season you as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so tender,
my need for God absolutely clear.

    - Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
​so He also loves the bow that is stable.

    - Kahlil Gibran

She's not "maternal," she's dangerous.
                                   - Jamaal May

I have no charms.  Admittedly.
No gold comb can move through
This mane.  My skin is not translucent.
Mine is a tail to fear.  I know.
And though a mother may destroy,
She too sees fit to create beauty
That would eventually grow into forms
I would swallow if I gave in
To my hungers.  Nothing will come
Of this womb.  But, up from my wounds--
From this goat's body--
Up from my wood-smoke lungs, from
The milk of me, comes a song, a melody
To open yours, then lick them clean.

    - Vievee Francis

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white 
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

​    - Ada Limon

Fortunate is the hour
when you stumbled and fell down into this.

Never stand again.
On your knees remain
where the earth is,

where the fire is ever-ready
and the air ever-clear,
water, and the stones of God.

For the Woods of Error are
the words of the real,
chosen for us as

the color of your soul.
Lie where forgiveness lies,
make love to that.

For there is nothing else
but gratitude, which is what
all your longing was for.

​    -Bruce Moody

​If I began the story in the middle
you might be able to smell the nixtamal, the earthy lime
of corn masa, and the tortillas rising on the comal, warm
hands flipping them into being. You might be able to feel
the spot where my long golden ribbon pierces the crust
of the Earth, thrust down through oceans and tectonic plates
even before they were dreamed into existence, looped
and woven into the shape that holds it all into place. You might hear
the rushing of feathers slicing air as thousands of angels fall
through the gap in space that birthed it all into view, each one
bringing a thread to the weaving of life, the matrix of this new world.
You might smell the smoke of the tlecuil, the oven in which life
is cooked into living, matter kneaded into feeling, formed
and pressed with fingers, breathed upon, gazed upon, made
to be something new, something transformed
from nothing to this. And here we live now, in the whole
of creation, remembering, forgetting,
and remembering again, nestling into the weft
of the fibers, yearning to be touched
by her hands again.

​ - Emily Grieves