Sometimes

David Whyte, “Sometimes,” from Everything Is Waiting For You, Copyright © 2003. David Whyte. Reprinted with permission from Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA. www.davidwhyte.com 

David Whyte is an Anglo-Irish poet, renowned for the widespread celebration of his poems; also, for his traction reintroducing a poetic sensibility into everyday life, perhaps especially in “white” USA. Through his books, speaking engagements, and other endeavors, Whyte challenges the notion that the meaningful and mystical are separate from domestic and even corporate spheres.

In the late 90s, when I worked as a hospice volunteer coordinator, our chaplain introduced me to Whyte’s book, “The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America,” (1994). It’s likely that the book gave me, a young poet and recent English creative writing graduate, “permission” to make poems a regular feature of our formidable volunteer training courses. The poems became many trainees’ favorite aspect of the course. We began to share poetry as a regular part of metabolizing our feelings and experiences attending to people at the end of life and their families.

As happens when two are tuned in to a certain frequency of existence, my dear friend, Rick, at just the right time, shared Whyte’s poem, “Sometimes” with me. I hope it’s the same for you, now.