“Poetry is medicine” –  Alice Walker

I’ve been asked to choose a poem to read as part of an interview I  am giving this weekend for the Healing and Cancer podcast series. It has prompted me to look back through my most beloved poems, many of which I featured in a regular Poetry Friday section on this blog.

I think it’s time to reinstate this feature don’t you? So each Friday you can expect a poem in your inbox if you subscribe to Journeying Beyond updates. And I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to suggest a poem for inclusion, or perhaps feature one of your own poems here. Please do get in touch.  Here is today’s poem.

Dark Charms 
Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

~Dorianne Laux~