Sonnet #184

There is a hole in the center of us all
A passing through of things, a gape
a place where laughter rises and falls
Where sorrow swells and hardens hate
This hole, the more we pour into this hole
The emptier this place in us becomes
It fills with emptiness, until the toll
of the hole pays in everywhere we run.

Let us go, then, to the wild places, where
the lake swells against the reeds
and the trees lean and grow to dip their
branches into the shimmering. I need
Cicada songs in high summer, birds and turtles
basking beside me, we lean back in the world