A Bit of What I’ve Learned – a poem by Angela Hoffman

A Bit of What I’ve Learned

There will be detours, side trips in your journey. 
You will deviate from the path that is trodden. 
You can’t stay unconscious when you are lost. 
Pay attention. 
You’ll learn to be resourceful, to depend on the stranger. 
You’ll get stronger, softer at the center when moving on the edges. 
It’s there you’ll learn about radical acceptance. 

Then find your church even if its in a large box, a tree, 
in the pine sap, the mud, the tender green.
Love, make bread, feed someone kindness. 
Walk, take a nap, remember the Sabbath. 
Attend to your work. The doing will teach you. 
Garden, hang laundry, dig, chop the onion. 
Subtract from your life but take every offering:
the tears, the laughter, the good, bad, the ugly. 
Look the other in the eye, look anywhere, 
and see humanity all mingled together with divinity. 

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in 2022. Her poems have been published internationally. She has written a poem a day since the start of the pandemic. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin.