Living Tree Poetry

The heart is in the middle of us.

Everything travels through it
at a cross roads.

And the heart is in the middle
that everything can blossom out of it.

And the things that look and feel
like stones are really sinking seeds,

making a home that in due season
they might bloom.

The heart is in the very middle
that there is no avoiding anything.

Even those things we most fear,
which arrive so silently or suddenly,

bringing their own weather
of squalls and sun.

Or solar storms
that the heart is a planet plummeting.

But in the end the heart is a beating organ.
Life-giving.

And everything that touches it
survives.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
July 2020

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

~ Mary Oliver