top of page
Writer's pictureIPM Team
Jan 5, 20231 min read

Love's Forge | Meredith Heller

January's monthly poem for IPM members and supporting donors is from

IPM Poetry Partner Meredith Heller.


These poems are posted monthly and shared first with our donors as a thank you for their support. We open January's poem to the public with an invitation for you to join in this support of the Poetic Medicine community by donating through one of the links above.


A human with shoulder length hair silhouetted in front of a blurred blue, pink, and purple background. On it is a poem titled "Love's Forge" by Meredith Heller "I thought she'd risen/fair and square/from the final fires//I thought all the birds/had broken through their shells/flown in dark spirals/to their own side of the moon//I thought spring had spread her wings/and dripping with dew/pulled her daughters up/from rain quenched soil//I thought her brother/finally cut her open/shook her skin like a snake/until she came clean//But Fate, that slippery fish/swam against the tide/shattering the light/with his shadow//He stopped her in her tracks/one Sunday afternoon in March/chewed his way right through her wrist/pieces of her flesh stuck between his teeth//Bound her with a metal plate/screwing her into place/until she dismembered/her past//In the forge of her will/she melted herself down/in the white hot heat//the last glowing embers/of survival rolled over/in surrender//I heard she drank the fire/I heard she tempered her sword/I heard she sat in stillness/until sleep found her//I hear her heart remembered to belong/I heard she tuned her compass/to a new wilderness/where each moment sings"

If a line or phrase resonates with you, we invite you to use it as a starting point to create your own poem.


We welcome you to share your poem with the IPM community here: A Poetry Commons.


 

Meredith Heller is an educator, poet and writer. As part of her IPM-funded Poetry Partner Program she facilitates Poetic Medicine circles for women in prison. Read more about this Poetry Partner work here.


Meredith will also be facilitating the program

Tags:

42 views0 comments

Comments

bottom of page