the world wrapped its arm around her shoulder
pushing off the cold chill
of a drifting cloud
no need to worry-weave warm fiber dreams
or cautiously retract into cozy turtlenecks
or lightly leap from the same with time
she turned toward the skies
its open eyes, its heart portal
to say, thank you
Post Script
The poem imagines a daughter searching for steadiness in a world where the people expected to shelter her may not always be present. Anxiety appears as something woven by the mind: warm fibers, protective clothing, and the impulse to withdraw into a self made safe through caution.
But the world itself reaches toward her. The drifting cloud brings cold, yet the larger wilderness remains dependable. It does not ask her to perform, to become acceptable, or to discover the correct version of herself before she can belong. In this sense, wilderness is not an escape from the world. It is the world encountered before it has been divided into all the selves we are expected to become.
When she turns toward the sky, she turns toward emptiness: not absence, but openness, the spaciousness in which no fixed self must be defended. The sky’s “open eyes” and “heart portal” suggest that emptiness is not indifferent. She is held within it, inseparable from the wilderness that surrounds her. Her thank-you arises from the realization that she does not have to find or manufacture herself before she can belong.
Image Credit
“Cashmere blend yarn” (2010), AnnaKika / Ulrika. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Primitive Joe 
