Member-only story
Good and Empty
A poem
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
― Rumi
Let us be good and empty
to allow something to fill us,
anything.
Enough to shake from our hearts the tar and sweat
the ones that cling and do not go,
no matter how much we try and scrub
let it leave us glistening
honouring our bodies to stop
when we feel good and empty
We have seen worse days and lived through them all
a sense that we could have stopped, right here
on this worse day,
but instead remained good and empty
It swept through us, the rage, the pain, the laughter
left us different now than we were before
and brought with it a gift