The Heart Centre
See if you can connect to your heart centre,
the nun says, and I’m not sure what she means.
Is it the same thing as my heart? I think.
I tune in to the feeling of my heart pumping in my chest
and I’m not sure whether to feel steadied
or worn out by its relentless rhythm.
Or is it my heart chakra? I wonder—but I haven’t learned about chakras.
I keep prodding around in my torso for it,
like a medical student dissecting a cadaver.
Here are my lungs, my stomach, my sex organs, my intestines.
I think they all know something about love.
—Then I find it—and it’s as though someone
looked over my shoulder and said, what do you mean
you can’t find the heart centre? It’s in your hands.
I find it just above my sternum, to the right of my physical heart,
in the middle of my chest. At first,
I think it’s the size of a grape but incredibly dense.
Then I see clearly it could grow to fill a larger space.
Here I am, cupping it in my palms.
You don’t have to earn love, the nun says now. You just have to breathe it in.
My heart centre seems to inflate with my next breath
and I can see it’s even older than I am.
I look at all the love I’ve ever known,
all the love that has ever known me:
still here inside my chest. I know for sure now,
no one who’s ever been in my heart centre has ever left.
All that love is still in there, transformed by pain,
betrayal, fear, anger, grief.
I breathe in the love the whole world has for me,
and it flows through my heart centre,
and I breathe out the love I have for the whole world.
Thea Ayres is a poet from West Yorkshire, and a graduate of The Writing Squad. Her work has been commissioned by the Dead [Women] Poets Society. It has been published in The Scribe, Strix, Ink Sweat and Tears, The North and Poetry Wales. She was highly commended in the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Competition 2023.
Amethyst Review 