I feel how the poem moves through us, less like a needle and thread that pierces and binds us, though that, too, but it’s more that the poem moves through us the way a wind swirls through a garden and carries the scent of each flower, charging the air with a perfume created by the whole, an ephemeral, alchemical sweetness that honors the essence of everyone there, how they bring to the moment the full spectrum of their own unique experience, and knowing it will never ever again be like this, I trust, too, that it will always and forever be like this, trust we will gather and listen and feel and become that ineffable, inevitable fragrance, will become the honest scent of shared aliveness, trust that in every moment, every single bloom in the garden matters. |