What Forgiveness Takes

Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.) I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame… read article