Pause for Peace: For the Hardest Days

a poem by Clint Smith

Pinnacles National Park, photo by Laura Davis

This is a new feature on my Substack: Midweek Pause for Peace. I’ll pair a beautiful image with a poem—a little something for your heart and your nervous system.

—Laura

Some days we just need to stop and sink into the beauty of the natural world.

For the Hardest Days

by Clint Smith

Some evenings, after days when the world feels

like it has poured out all its despair onto me,

when I am awash with burdens that rests atop

my body like a burlap of jostling shadows,

I find a place to watch the sun set. I dig

my feet into a soil that has rebirthed itself

a million times over. I listen to the sound

of leaves as they decide whether or not

it is time to descend from their branches.

It is hard to describe the comfort one feels

in sittings with something you trust will always be

there, something you can count on to remain

familiar when all else seems awry. How remarkable

it is to know that so many have watched the same

sun set before you. How the wind can carry

pollen and drop it somewhere it has never been.

How the leaves have always become the soil

that then become the leaves again. How maybe

we are not so different than the leaves.

How maybe we are also always being reborn

to be something more then we once were.

How maybe that’s what waking up each morning is.

A reminder that we are born

of the same atoms as every plant and bird

and mountain and ocean around us.

Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and doctoral candidate in Education at Harvard University. He is a National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, and has served a cultural ambassador for the US Department of State. He has been featured on TED.com, NBC News, and TVOne’s Verses and Flow. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in GRAVTAS, Off the Coast, and elsewhere.