We sit on our skeletons’ bones.
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.
The original meaning of Paradise: a place,
a walled garden.
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.
Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.
The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts.
A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.
Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.
Not nectar, not thirst.
May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.
May you have your portions of beauty, of grief,
in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine.
Copyright © 2026 by Jane Hirshfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
