Written by Maria Popova
Just after I started the year with some blessings, a friend sent me a copy of Lucille Clifton's, a wonderful poem that “blesses the boats.” We once met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poems next year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a shared message. (The amazing thing about minds, in terms of their amazing diversity, is that different things can blossom in them from the same seed.)
I've been thinking about forgiveness – about its quiet power to remove the lump of guilt from the envelope of time and fill life's lungs with the oxygen of possibility, about how you bless your life when you forgive your mother, you forgive your father, you forgive someone for whom your love was not enough, forgive someone your love is more than him, forgive yourself, over and over again.
This is the poem that unfolded to me in Clifton's opening line, read here by Nick Cave (who wrote beautifully about self-forgiveness and awakened my season of blessings by taking me to church, for the first time, on the morning of my fortieth birthday).
FORGIVENESS
by Maria PopovaMay the waves
do not tire of its struggle
how repeatedly
forgives the Moon
daily exile
and returns to repentance
the mountains become sand
as if to say,
you can have it too
this is coming home
you have it too
this basic power
of repentance
a stone in the heart
in gold dust.
