My life,
you were a door
I was given to walk through

—Jane Hirshfield, from “The Asking: New and Selected Poems”

•••

What was that opening
that I walked through

before I could walk
before I was fully formed

before I felt like me?
An opening into listening

this human life wrapped
in skin, scaffolded in bone

not ending there but
flowing into the rhythms

of the world as a being
of it and not of it,

walking through on
feet shod with wonder.