Now I Wait and Meditate – a poem by Diana Woodcock

Now I Wait and Meditate


Turns out Simone (Weil) was right—
waiting for goodness and truth is 
far more intense than searching.

I have waited in the desert 
till the stillness became the very
evidence of the Creator, 

the stillness a shrillness—
	that roar which lies on the other side
	[of silence].*								

Now I wait and meditate on 
our brokenness, our need to love 
and be filled with compassion

so we might heal the earth 
and thus ourselves. I wait 
in profound silence that is 

shattered by one Red Velvet mite 
laying eggs in the spoiled soil,
and larvae of a Rhinocerous beetle 

boring into the stem
of a dying date palm.
I wait for goodness and truth,

praying to remember, though I never
owned slaves nor stole land 
from the First Nations. I wait,

listening beside unmarked 
burial grounds, the stones 
underfoot glistening the truth.

I wait, watching a Polar bear
jump from one melting ice floe
to another, nowhere else to go.

*George Eliot

Diana Woodcock has authored seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot (winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award), Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist) and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic.