This is a small thank-you poem to two friends who lifted my heart this week: Angela, who walked along an open ridge with me in the windy sunshine, with the long grasses rippling before us and the red-winged blackbirds swirling up from the ditches; and Teresa, who read a new poem I had written and then wrote to me about it, in words that were not praise or criticism but deep attention.

Sometimes I feel like the loneliest person on earth, but not this week, not with the two of you.

Revelation

Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require

(Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us where they are.

[from A Boy's Will (1913)]