A bit of poem that touched me today...

[shadowkat]

The last poem in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language.

...we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
At most we're allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman's voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman's heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Someone sent it to me over the weekend. The poem hit me oddly, emiting one of those awe sounds that comes when something strikes a chord.
Life is overwhelming even at the beginning. Amazing we muddle through.