I went to a poetry reading at the lovely Falkirk House, sponsored by the Marin Poetry Center. It was a reading entitled Poetry and Spirituality, featuring my friend and fellow Squaw attendee, Christina Hutchins, and a woman I hadn’t known before, Kim Rosen. Kim recited an Easter Poem that caught my imagination. Here it is:
In Impossible Darkness
Do you know how
the caterpillar
turns?
Do you remember
what happens
inside a cocoon?
You liquefy.
There in the thick black
of your self-spun womb,
void as the moon before waxing,
you melt
(as Christ did
for three days
in the tomb)
conceiving
in impossible darkness
the sheer
inevitability
of wings.
Kim is a great advocate of memorizing and reciting poems, a practice I find not only enriching, but useful when (for example) you are waiting without a book on a long line., or having trouble sleeping. I have a library I can recite to myself–so delicious! I plan to add Kim’s poem to my repertoire.
I like this poem very much.
the sheer
inevitability
Yes, a delightful play on words.