Praise

The melody in your voice is my god;
my ears tune in to the rises and falls,

the tides of your song—my heartbeat follows.
Convert me to this love, silent preacher;

take me in your arms and dissolve me to nothing.
Your softness is a touch of redemption,
vanishing body weight into pure crystal light.

I renounce mind and thoughts for this closeness.
Thinking does not move my hand closer to yours;
mind doesn’t know how to rest on your shoulder.

Our union in laughter is my god;
fears transform into belly-aching sobs of joy.

Praise be to timelessness in these moments,
and the radiance you set afire.

 

Collective Memory

Rewriting a moment—
there’s no editing of the past;
at last, the shouts come through,
burning to be heard.

The listeners, the wanderers, the prophets
lined up to accept the ones inside of us,
crying to be seen.

 

Love

You want to speak
but the windows

behind your words

are about to

shatter.

 

Untitled

Softness—
more delicate
than how
clouds might brush
skin,
more like the
tip of a candle flame
bathed in
waves of oxygen,

or

melting
that emerges
the moment before
holding,

or

being in the midst of
tenderness,
innate rapture of seeing.

 

The Body Knows

Skin inching towards skin,
contours, round surfaces
like velvet spread across
shoulders, hands to tongues,
symphonic nerve fibers,
a fluidity of voices.

Bodies enveloped by being,
returning to is from not.

Ripples of sound,
waves of listening

stream through the body,

pulsations of time’s
desire to absorb
this beauty of now.

Warming motion,
delicacy of water
turning towards
bones submerged in
our skin’s grace.

The body knows
how to move
with this joy.

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  • Lori Shridhare is a director of communications at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. She is a freelance journalist, editor, and science writer specializing in human rights and medicine, collective trauma, and topics in bioethics and anatomy. Her writing has appeared in Harvard Medicine magazine, Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, The Harvard Gazette, MIT News, Dillydoun Review, Tricycle, Positive News UK, and The Seventh Wave. She received her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island, and MA in science writing from Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.