Hey everyone. I recently stumbled on these two poems and I haven't been able to get them out of my mind, so I've decided to read them for you (and test out a new, more portable mic in the process - more tinkering to be done). I hope you find something in them like I did.

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Lost

David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

Gloria Mundi

Michael Kleber-Diggs

Come to my funeral dressed as you would for an autumn walk in the woods.

Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission to be late, even without good cause.

If my day arrives when you had other plans, please proceed with them instead. Celebrate me

there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned

to a period, a place, a people. Remember me in stories—not the first time we met, not the last,

a time in between. Our moment here is small. I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things—

one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still. Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,

compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful, wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow

and decay, let me be lovely yet temporal, like memories, like mahogany.

​

- B