A few years ago I taught a troubled teenager. He struggled with rage and isolation, and had trouble believing in himself. When his birthday came around, I wrote him this poem–and without a preconceived reason as to why, I was moved to share it with you today.
Every seed
is hand-crafted
and placed lovingly
in a world of sweetness.
Someone eats the fruit
and casts the seed aside,
and the seed keeps the memory
of being surrounded with sweetness
for the rest of its life.
Every seed
contains the hope of sky,
and the memory of a twisted passageway,
and longing–longing for light.
And inside every seed
burns a steady darkness.
Not the kind where you can just make out the shapes
of things, but the kind where nothing
is visible.
Every seed needs that kind of darkness,
for that is the way it will look
when they are planted in the ground.
A Fisherman once told his fellow fishermen
to cast their nets into the deepest, darkest part
of the sea. Soon they were up to their knees in fish.
Not all darkness is bad.
And every seed
holds a question.
That question, once answered,
opens that seed into vast, cathedrals
of light. And then,
life blazes upwards,
past stones, through earth,
through darkness, and out–
out into the golden warmth
of limitless possibilities.
Copyright Joseph Anthony of the Wonder Child Blog