my poetry cup by Rebecca Jean Harris

Last year Poetry Shelf dedicated a number of posts to protest poems. Especially Gaza. Especially the preservation of Thomson Gorge in Central Otago. These days my news feeds are flooded with issues I want to challenge, to speak out against. Choices, for example, our current government is making, whether in health, education, land care, flora and fauna care, water care, the homeless, the hungry, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, speaking te reo Māori, diverse cultures, racism, sexism, genderism, the Arts, then Sciences, and so much more. Or whether it’s the heartbreaking toll on human lives, homes, communities in the Middle East where men, women and children are bargain chips. And where some people, especially aid workers, are working against all odds to heal and mend rather than destroy and barter.

What matters?

What matters to us when each day is a patchwork of light and dark, hope and despair. When helplessness can be a contagion with both personal and global infusions.

Poetry Shelf will continue to protest and speak out in the form and voice of poems.

But I am now offering you The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Each week I invite you to enter a poem as breathing space, a slender moment to recharge, a solace device. A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.

The poem becomes a temporary breathing room. A miniature act of self care. Art can do this. A painting or photograph or sculpture can do this. Music can do this. Music can most definitely do this. I am mindful that we would all select different poems to stand in for the breathing room, but over the coming months, I invite you to enter the room and recharge your mind and heart.

Just for a slender exquisite gentle meditative moment.