To The Ones Who Left Their Light

In honor of Poetry Month, we are truly blessed to have the writings of so many talented poets from centuries ago whose words continue to inspire, comfort, and connect us across time.

They are gone now,

the ones who sat alone

in the dark and sacred hours,

searching for the word

that would say the thing

no one else had dared to say.

📜🖋

They poured their whole lives

into lines,

offered up their grief and wonder,

their ordinary mornings,

their devastating losses,

their moments of sudden joy

so piercing

it had to be written down

or it would have been lost forever.

📜🖋

And here we are,

still reading them.

Still finding ourselves

on pages wrinkled with time,

still catching our breath

at a line written a century ago

by someone who felt

exactly what we feel today,

who looked at this same sky,

this same aching world,

and found the words

we never could.

📜🖋

What a gift they left us.

What a tremendous, unasked for gift.

To sit with Whitman in the open.

To walk with Frost along a road.

To hear Dickinson tell us

that hope is a feathered thing

and believe her completely.

📜🖋

They gave us a voice

for the interior life,

for the places inside ourselves

we could never quite describe,

and in doing so

they made us feel

gloriously,

tenderly,

less alone.

📜🖋

So here is to the poets,

the ones who are gone

and the ones still writing,

who trusted that somewhere,

sometime,

someone would need

exactly these words,

and were right.