On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind.

Learn about the 2020 Templeton Prize winner, Dr. Francis Collins, and his work to find

a cure for COVID-19 at TempletonPrize.org.

Poetry rises up in human societies when official words fail us and we lose sight of how to

find our way back to one another, how to hear each other's voices.

This hour, six poems accompany the struggle, strangeness, and possibilities of being alive

in this time.

We traverse worlds with words, from the tender work of forgiving ourselves to the mighty

Lucille Clifton asking, won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?

I'm Christa Tippett and this is On Being.

We've crafted what follows from excerpts of the newest season of the Poetry Unbound

podcast.

Each episode takes a single poem at its center with Padreco Tuma reading the poem and

meditating on it.

This is a new adventure of On Being Studios and Padreco is the On Being Project's very

own poet slash theologian.

He's esteemed in Northern Ireland and around the world at the intersection of language,

spiritual insight, and conflict resolution.

My name is Padreco Tuma and the longer that I've written poetry and read poetry, I realize

that poetry is asking me to be brave to go into the moments of my own failure and to narrate

those not as projects of self-hatred but as projects of observation in the possibility

...