Notes from Exile: Atonement

Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.

Yesterday in Justice Notes, I wrote about atonement in the spirit of Rosh Hashanah—a season of repentance and reflection. Today, for Log/Verse, I want to share lines from David Whyte’s poem COLEMAN’S BED.

Whyte reminds us that renewal isn’t about erasing the past, but about weathering its weight and shaping ourselves into the person we most want to be—the self we’d like to present to the world before we leave it.

It’s a reminder I carry with me as I move forward, pebble by pebble, into this next season of renewal.

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AN EXCERPT FROM COLEMAN’S BED BY DAVID WHYTE

See with every turning day,

how each season makes a child

of you again, wants you to become

a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,

watch now, how it weathers you

to a testing in the tried and true,

admonishes you with each falling leaf,

to be courageous, to be something

that has come through, to be the last thing

you want to see before you leave the world.

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You can read the entire poem here, COLEMAN'S BED. Coleman was an Irish saint who lived in a cave beneath a chapel overlooking the Irish Sea in the West of Ireland. This holy site inspired David Whyte’s poem and reflects on themes of self-compassion and welcoming one’s own outcast parts, drawing a parallel between the saint’s humble life and personal spiritual growth.