by Lisa Rutledge
It swaddles us before birth as the beat of Mother’s heart and the ebb and flow of her breathing.
Later we clothe it in language that fits like skin--or like billowing drapes. It mists above, between, and beneath our layers.
It takes grief’s yoke and passion’s furnace and arranges them, calling to our minds timpani, trumpets, clarinets, and violins.
This symphony uproots barbed fences and seeps through cracks in concreteness when we find familiar rhythms in our fellow pilgrims.
The messenger of the soul, this is the shared invisible made visible, the desired, dreaded, tasted, touched.
Conduit of triumph and trial transcending time and space, it helps us live more fully. To recognize poetry is to glimpse the Divine.