When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.
When someone deeply listens to you,
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!
When someone deeply listens to you,
your bare feet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.
— John Fox, from Finding What You Didn’t Lose (via)
In the fallout now
It’s hard to feel like we can turn around
With the damage done
It’s hard to see how far we’ve come
We could not be proud
Of where our feet have walked along the ground
In the silence now
We play it back and forwards again
There’s a sound in our guiltiness
It’s a warning bell that rings
It’s a call to our loneliness
And we can’t see
We roll the dice we play like fools
We plead with time to change the rules
It’s like a hurricane is coming our way
We’ve all been warned but we still chose to stay
I can’t believe it now the time has come
Play the victim here
You know it’s nothing but your pride and fear
But the more you hurt
The more you love the one you were
There’s a sound in our guiltiness
It’s a warning bell that rings
It’s a call to our loneliness
And we can’t see
We roll the dice we play like fools
We plead with time to change the rules
It’s like a hurricane is coming our way
We’ve all been warned but we still chose to stay
I can’t believe it now the time has come
In the light of the morning
Can we change what we felt and heard
Can we turn it into the glory
Break the paths of our fathers before us
Though we stand on the outside
We will find what we once believed
And will crawl our way to the clear skies
Standing up we are
Standing up we are
We roll the dice we play like fools
We plead with time to change the rules
It’s like a hurricane is coming our way
We’ve all been warned but we still chose to stay
You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names - and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles - you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
Who do you believe when you can’t get through
When everything you know seems so untrue
When I’m lost in a place that I thought I knew
Give me some way that I might find you
