Mental health is an issue that many people believe can be easily solved with a pill, not realizing the impact nor the pseudo-anesthetic state that can accompany such a protocol, especially long term. Kristin’s poem not only addresses this complex love/hate relationship with “meds,” but honors the inner wildness that doesn’t always want to be tamed, and does so in beautiful language.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Sacred Ground

by Kristin Roedell

Both disease and meds
will rob you of yourself
my psychiatrist said,
glasses suspended
from a necklace
brash as a trapper’s
trading beads.

I am strung by the neck
by every dose; I cannot
trade with anyone—

but I take the effacing pills.
I remember I chose
this compromised wellness;

It’s too late to choose anew.
To my lover, I say:
there must be a wilderness
at the edge of memory
and mind—
It will have its raw
untilled splendor.

If I grow silent,
believe I still thrive:
I’m blooming like cacti
in crimson petals,
I’m dreaming of oceans
asleep in the dunes.

Remember
I am remembering you
In every moment.

Then, let me be unwise,
and forget my pills,
I want to wander
the dark among Joshua trees.

I want to sleep with
the sand bats
that wake to hunt mayflies,
I want to nest with a peregrine
on a cliff’s edge.

Be kind
and let me go mad
beneath the devouring
moon.

from Lessons in Buoyancy by Kristin Roedell (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Sacred Ground” <br>by Kristin Roedell appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Please enjoy today’s selection: “Dirty Girl” by Kristin Roedell, which appears in The Poeming Pigeon: Doobie or Not Doobie:

Dirty Girl

Fall and winter mornings
were awash with mist.
It took me an hour
to circle the lake;
I sat on every bench,
I memorized the plaques.

A moss-covered tree stretched
branches across the shallows;
the ducks were pearled along
them, waiting for the winter sun
to come up,
bills tucked into feathers.

I saw God
in the simple angles
that followed them
as they swam.
When startled, they lifted
in a flood of wings, returning
like a gentle rain.

September
I sat under a red and gold oak,
leaves spread beneath me
in a rich gown.
December
I walked the high trails,
a hoarfrost on the reeds.
I wrote a poem (this poem)

to not forget the sound
of leaves underfoot.
I have never known
such a graceful falling
of the year.

It might have been
the marijuana,
pungent and strong;
I smoked it that year.
They called it
Dirty Girl—

but I have never been
so clean.

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