Sometimes: DAVID WHYTE
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you
questions
that have no right
to go away.
From David Whyte: Essentials (2019). David Whyte says of the poem Sometimes that he got his inspiration from nature, and specifically, from an illustrated book of Native American stories he received as a child. The story that stood out for him had an ‘image of a young boy in a primeval forest being taught by an elder how to cross a piece of broken ground, without making a single sound.’ He adds, ‘we are all moving silently and unannounced, all transiting and maturing into new territories and new dispensations without the essentials of those transitions ever having been explained or spoken.’
Photographer: Martina Nicolls
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