Morning Lessons

The lessons never stop
and you feel like a schoolboy
even as your hair thins and greys,
even as scars accumulate
like road maps, navigating
a shape shifting world where love
is something new,
both exciting and frightening
in both it’s birth and death;

navigating emotions that dance
wrathe like,
just out of reach,
nameless, invisibly powerful
as wind in the night.

Would it help to give them names?
Grief? Anger? Joy? Madness?
Do they have meaning, these words,
or is it the stew that is your soul
that gives them meaning,
something new each morning
as you emerge from your sleep
helpless as a child?

This is why you pray,
to calm your unruly mind,
to empty it’s wildness,
if only for a few hours,
to learn the lessons of silence,
to be filled with something
far better, far stronger
than yourself.

About this poem

How we begin our day matters. Most mornings I begin my day with devotions, with prayer and meditation, and with the writing of poetry. There is little virtue in this. It is like Manna to me, a feeding of a soul that left to it’s own devices, flounders.

The older I get, the simpler the lessons become. Not because I know so much, but because I realize it is the simple things, the basics, that are important. So those are the lessons to learn, and learn, and learn again.

Tom