If We Could Know Our Bones <3 Throwing Back to a Older Poem

Feeling the need to share the title poem from my 2013 book, If We Could Know Our Bones–if we saw how much we’re alike, could we be kinder?

If We Could Know Our Bones

But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty.~Gospel of Thomas

If we could know our bones the way we know our skin, perhaps we’d not dig graves, but build rooms, havens, shrines, for even our enemies, their bodies rescued from the ditch and battlefield, no longer pitched into holes, safe and out of sight, but standing, eloquent and equal in their lines: tines of rib, cradle of skull, clavicle like a little key, memories of movement in femur and fluted tibia, their jaws, hinged and singing, angel light pouring through the basin of each pelvis. Free of water, fat and muscle, perhaps they’d claim us, tell us of sharing even what can’t be known–Os innominatum– those nameless bones.

-Mary Carroll-Hackett, 2013

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay