What my daughter knows

Katies Poems on Hope

Katie Winton-Henry is a two-tree spirit. Born of another mother and father, she is my soul child.

Katie singing “Amazing Grace” at her grandfather’s funeral

Those who enter life through adoption are initiated by a primal wound during birth. Before there are words, they know the complex uncertainty of belonging.

For Katie, belonging isn’t a fact. She had to navigate her genetic tree and adopted family tree, without full bodily mirroring from either. Despite the power of our chosen love, as a highly sensitive, twice-exceptional person, she had to learn to manage all kinds of energetic realities that got thrown at her. A consequence is that Katie has experienced a spectrum of suffering and compassion greater than I will ever know.

I hope someday Katie will share her story, a story that includes a descent into hell, significant spiritual power, and formidable gifts of music, poetry, and empathetic service offered today in her role as a lead addiction counselor in a men’s prison.

Her voice is one of my saving graces. After a week of oceanic grief, powerless to make things better, Katie must have sensed my sorrow when she sent me some of her recent poetry about finding hope where she is. She viscerally reassured me of the legacies we pass on and all the community and support I’ve received that helps me dance in my storms.

Katie says, “The lower yards in the prison are on lockdown, so I have had a lot of downtime. This is a poem I wrote about my mother, InterPlay, and the legacy she left me!”

The Dance I Carry

I was born not of blood, but of breath. The breath that sings, the breath that dances.

She moved not just through space, but through spirit. A rhythm-maker, a body-listener, an artist in sacred motion.

In her footsteps, the floor became sky, and stories rose up like laughter from the earth.

She called it InterPlay, but to me, it was simply home: a place where silence listens, where stillness speaks, where the body tells truths we didn’t know we were hiding.

I carry her movement in my muscles. Not just the sway or the stretch, but the why of it— the healing, the holding, the holy joy.

In the echo of her voice, I guide others

in still rooms behind steel doors, where freedom is a kind of whisper, and grace is what we practice between broken things.

They don’t always know it’s her, but it is. Each time I open space for breath, for story, for dance —I am her echo made real.

She passed me the mirror not to see myself, but to reflect the divine in others.

And so I move. And so I guide. And so I carry the dance forward.

Also, two poems about metabolizing the collective disaster of bombing Iran.

In the Boundary of Disaster

The sky forgets its gentler hues—
bleeds iron, breathes ash,
and even silence snaps like bone beneath the strain.
Hope is reckless here—
a stubborn ember in the black,
gritting its teeth against the wind.
Yet in this war-torn hush,
where the seams of certainty rip,
a hand still reaches. Still dares to mend.
Because even in the wreckage,
in the marrow-deep tremble of undoing,
there lives a pulse.
Tender. Intractable.
Human.

Where the Quiet Fights Back

It begins not with thunder, but with the flick of a light no one noticed was out.
A flame, dancing in the souls of the forgotten.
It grows in the hush between two slammed doors,
a rebellion breathed through cracked lips.
Whispers of uncertainty washed away by love’s triumphant song.
Not loud, but steady—like roots breaking through concrete.
Steady, like the heartbeat of those crying out for connection. For peace.
A rhythm rising in the quiet, daring to name the hurt and still believe.
Belief, a strange thing. Fickle yet stubborn.
It flinches, then plants its feet—too tender to conquer, too fierce to die.
Weaving quilts of silence and stillness. Of joy and jubilation.
Laid gently across the ache,
a patchwork promise: we go on.

I am so honored that Katie loves my book, The Art of Ensoulment: How to Create From Body and Soul, and shares it with participants at the prison.

Honestly, I am trying to take in the degree to which Katie sees and cares about my offerings.

Here is one last poem, a love poem to me. (Please know that I have been a source of pain to Katie as well. Perhaps someday Katie will share those more difficult poems as well. If we have come through our horrible aches as mother and daughter, it is thanks to our guides, ancestors, spirit teams, and on my side, a grateful member of Alanon!)

Serpentine Energy

She entered vastness,
she who knows that soul is a key.
She who sees in the dark,
the struggle to redeem body and soul.
A flowering, visionary mystic,
who notices patterns of ease and resistance.
She, whose courage goes through fire,
knowing her body and soul are hers.
Dancer, improvisor, and artist,
she knows bodies are wise.
She, who collaborates with the universal soul,
and trusts that she can play.
Energy moves before her as she dances the miraculous lineage of song,
continuing through the vastness.