WHAT I MUST TELL MYSELF I know this house, and this horizon, and this world I have made. I know this silence and the particular treasures and terrors of the way I try to belong to my work, my loved ones and my life. But I cannot know the world to which I am going. I have only this breath and this presence for my wings and they carry me in my body whatever I do from one hushed moment to another. I know my innocence and against all sense, I know something of my unknowing, and strangely I know through all this innocence and unknowing, what I have accomplished, but for all my successes I go through life like a blind child who cannot see, arms outstretched trying to put together a world. And the world works on my behalf catching me in its arms when I go too far. I don’t know what I ever could have done to have earned such faith. Watching the geese go south I find that even in silence and even in stillness and even in my home alone without a thought or a movement, I am part of a great migration that will take me to another place. And though all the things I love may pass away and the great family of things and people I have invited around me will see me go, I feel them living in me like a great gathering about to go with me, to reach a greater home. When one thing dies all things die together, and must live again in a different way, when one thing is missing everything is missing, and must be found again in a new whole, and everything wants to be complete, everything wants to go home and the geese traveling south are like the shadow of my breath flying into the darkness on great heart-beats, to the unknown land where I belong. This morning above the house they have found me again, strangely full of faith, like a blind child, nestled in their feathers, following a great coast to the home I cannot see. David Whyte
David Whyte
‘What I Must Tell Myself’ : Revised
From the upcoming book
‘Still Possible’ : Autumn 2021
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2021
Orcas Island at Dusk.
Photo © David Whyte
From Lummi Island. Nov. 2nd 2020
“I have thirty new poems for my upcoming volume ‘Still Possible’ but I also have two or three pieces included from past volumes that I have revised slightly, where I feel they limped a little or didn’t go far enough in their clarity of meaning. ‘What I Must Tell Myself’ strangely, seems even more prescient than when I first wrote it over twenty years ago.” DW
Header Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash