How The Flowers Felt

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
~James Baldwin

Poems of empathy and encouragement today. If you'd like more, visit Poems to Lean On from a 2013 post.

Zinnia in the Storm

Lodged
by Robert Frost

The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

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To Know The Dark
by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

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Rooted by Noah G.

excerpt from A Home in Dark Grass
by Robert Bly

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;

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The Miss Rumphius Effect is the Poetry Friday host today.