I learned to write poetry in fourth grade
and it was like learning to breathe.
Not as you do when you’re newly born:
gasping, clawing, screaming your bloody way into the world.
But as they teach you at your first yoga class:
Calm, deep, loud, self-conscious.
Watching your belly rise and fall with amazement at its wavelike motion
As if it hadn’t been possible all along.
—
But the best yoga instructor forgets to breathe through the nose sometimes
And we amateurs only remember when we are reminded.
—
Sometimes I’m gently reminded by the grass between my toes
that I can write.
But most of the time
The world suddenly becomes
too bright
too loud
the hospital room too foreign.
—
And I have the choice
to scream so loudly the doctor recalculates my Apgar score
or
to sink further into my pose:
reaching forward on the inhale,
grounding downward on the exhale.
Excessive Ramblings 