Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 17 features Angela Dribben reading “In my throat” and Caren reading “Not About Weather or Onions or the Poem You Wrote Twenty-four Years Ago Today.” In my throat By Angela Dribben Another life. Lungs of the forest. Roots pulse comforts to one another. The first one to die bequeaths all they once lived for. Were we once trees? We clamber to find one another. Is it our palms listening, held hot to bark—one risen rough and rigid, one smooth as the Earth’s tilt. A trust of one another before we ever pressed together flesh, mine to yours. You’re the only one I’ve never known how to leave. The only one i ever rooted into. My anchor. My source. Your Magnolia bark the antidote to my anxiety. Your seed my pain killer, fever reducer. Grandiflora. Salve for soft-bellies. i, your Oak. My medicine your astringent. Your remedy. My canopy your shelter, come October a mantel of auburn and gold to hang your worries on. When steeped & distilled your conelike flowers ward off Autumnal fever—i am your barn, your barrel, your ship, your bed. This pulsing through the earth. This way we ache for one another. Otherworld, Underworld, in another life. Our ancestors Hickory, Poplar, Dogwood, Redbud, medicines of the earth, muladhara of the earth. Hyphae calling us home. Not About Weather or Onions or the Poem You Wrote Twenty-four Years Ago Today (After reading Ted Kooser’s poem, “March 11” in Winter Morning Walks) by Caren Stuart With the light of this day so brilliantly bright and the tease of these clouds so delicately white, and the dancing of this sky such a breezy delight, it’s the blueness of the blue in the height of this high that’s impossible to pen, with its piercing infinity so inviting the seeking of my soul and mind’s eye today. I have set a timer for an hour of concrete writing in this room full of windows and hot tea and candles and a plate full of slices of peanut buttered Honeycrisp apple. With the whispering warm of mid-March settling deep into soil here, teasing the delicate sleep of small bulbs to stir into stretching even their slenderest, tenderest shoots into growing up into sweet as scallion or savory as onion, i feel so ensconced in my own so seemingly fragile, so delicately layered, so almost translucent, papery skins. This is mostly to say that this sky is so full of itself, it is filling me up. Up. And away. Today. And yesterday. And tomorrow and back into all of the yesterdays ever. Yours. Or mine. Yours AND mine. It’s that good... even though I can’t begin to begin to write adequately about any of this... ever... at all. You wrote a poem: March 11 (twenty-four years ago today) I received it and this: all of this...