Poems from “YOU MATTER” class ~ 5/31/26

You-Shaped Hole ( Tara Mohr)

Sometimes the world feels inhospitable.

You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit.

You see what’s missing, how it all could be different.

You feel as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t meant for you,

as if the world is “the way it is” and your discomfort with it a problem.

So you get timid. You get quiet about what you see.

But what if this?

What if you are meant

to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track

in just the particular ways that you do?

The world has a you-shaped hole in it.

It is missing what you see.

It lacks what you know

and so you were called into being.

To see the gap, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.

Filling it is speaking what is missing.

Filling it is stepping into the center of the crowd, into a clearing,

and saying, here, my friends, is the future.

You don’t have to do it all, but you do have to speak it.

You have to tell your slice of the truth.

You do have to walk toward it with your choices, with your own being.

Then allies and energies will come to you like fireflies swirling around a light.

The roughness of the world, the off-track-ness, the folly that you see,

these are the most precious gifts you will receive in this lifetime.

They are not here to distance you from the world,

but to guide you to your contribution to it.

The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it.

In that way you are important.

In that way you are here to make the world.

In that way you are called.

When I Look up at the Stars (Hannah Rowe)

When I look up at the stars,

Awed by their effectual,

Burnished light,

I often wonder what they see when looking down at me.

I imagine it sees a tiny,

Quibbling ball of energy and light bouncing inside its walls.

An eruption,

Trying to happen,

But contained inside some invisible limit.

An impossible tension of light trying to spill into space,

But too afraid of unleashing.

I imagine the stars are watching with hopeful anticipation for the fighting energy to reach the beam.

Will it sputter,

Fizzle,

And stop?

Or will it grow into itself?

I can imagine them looking down at us,

Rooting for the birth of another star.

Sometimes if I move my body enough,

Sweat will weep from every pore,

Turning me into water.

A flowing,

Hot body of blood and breath,

A wonderful,

Fluid thing.

And in Raptured,

I see life is for the taking.

That I am built to encounter and savor.

Four thousand taste buds line my tongue.

Some four million touch receptors coat my skin.

And a nearly unbearable celebration inhabits every cell.

Warmed into liquid,

I feel my essence spill from its confinement into the room,

Laughing as it breaks the clay pot.

When I have worked myself open,

I become acutely aware of the tempered glass walls and dams I have broken out from.

The not visible,

But all too real cell of my defended life.

It's too hard,

I can't,

I don't want to.

That will hurt,

And that even more.

That's too terrifying,

Too far,

Too foreign,

Too uncomfortable.

I don't feel good.

Abort,

Stop,

Turn down,

Turn from,

Turn back into the shell.

The thing we are arguing against,

This faceless stranger we oppose daily,

Is our life force trying to unleash itself and find its way into its beam.

Offering an endless assortment of inspired thought and action.

And all we can do most days is tell it how many ways it is flawed and wrong and irrational.

All we can do most days is build invisible walls around it as it bumps and bounds and leaps away inside.

Remaining hostage is a sad way to live out your life in the unknown,

And a tragic way to return in the end to the unknown.

I don't want to arrive in death tail between my legs saying,

I forgot.

I got so lost in the lament that I neglected to love.

I forgot to play and smile and say yes.

I forgot to stop arguing instead of agreeing.

I forgot to use all of my energy for expression,

Abandonment,

And discovery.

I forgot to ignite and invite my vitality to spread itself over continents.

I forgot to cut the shoes off my feet and walk through the pathless wood.