Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.
—Natalie Goldberg, from “Writing Down the Bones”

•••

Buddhist monks train for years to create
intricate mandalas of colorful sand,
spending days of meditative work

to painstakingly build them, then,
when finished, ceremoniously brush
the sand into a pile, place it in an urn,

and pour it into a nearby river,
carrying the blessings of those holy souls
to the ocean to spread throughout

the world. The lesson of impermanence
teaches that everything, no matter
how beautiful, is not meant to exist

forever—a teaching I find myself
brushing up against here and here,
there and there, over the past year.

Again and again, what felt lasting
has been dismantled, scooped up,
taken away in rubble, in ashes,

and my little heart aches with each
passage. Which is why, for 1,095 days
now, I have put my sand mandalas

in poetry form into the world, without
expectation of acknowledgment,
to write them and release them,

awash in imperfection, so humanly
human, as I practice humility and
the hard lesson of letting go

again and again and again.

•••

Today marks three years that I’ve been daily sending these poetic sand mandalas into the ether with no expectation that they’ll be seen or acknowledged… though so many have, and for that I am grateful.

I continue to be inspired by long-time daily poets like Esther Cohen and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and others like James Crews who generously offer their work regularly on social media and on websites. Their words and those of other writers—younger and older, living and dead—are what feeds creativity in us all.