One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn

“One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up—the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning—I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.” Thus speaks Alice Oswald, the poet who listens to rivers, to earth, to silence. Her words reveal the birth of a vocation not in triumph, but in trembling; not in joy, but in the long night of fear. In them we learn how despair can carve the channel through which the waters of creation flow.

The meaning of this confession lies in the encounter between terror and dawn. Terror strips away illusions; it leaves the soul naked before the abyss. But when dawn returns, when the world is clothed again in its ordinary light, the heart discovers that words are too small, too fragile, unless they are shaped as poetry. In that moment Oswald saw that poetry was not a pastime, but a vessel strong enough to carry the unbearable weight of fear and the unspeakable joy of survival. It became her chosen destiny, not merely an art but a vow.

The origin of her calling recalls the ancient belief that poetry is born of extremity. The Greeks told us that Orpheus descended into the underworld, and only by singing could he endure its terrors. His music was not learned in safety, but in the shadow of death. In the same way, Oswald’s decision arose from the crucible of a sleepless, haunted night. Terror was her underworld, and dawn her return. In poetry she found the Orphic power to bridge darkness and light, fear and relief, silence and speech.

History too offers witness to this truth. In the trenches of the First World War, young men, stripped of illusions, faced terror each night under bombardment. Many could not endure it; yet some, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, turned their anguish into verse. Their poetry is not only testimony, but survival—a way of speaking when ordinary language broke beneath the weight of horror. Oswald joins that lineage of poets for whom words are not embellishments but lifelines.

The lesson is luminous: when fear presses in, when the night feels endless, the soul must not be silent. Speak, write, sing—let the terror find shape, for in giving it form you rob it of its dominion. And when relief comes, when dawn returns with its blue sky, express gratitude not with shallow words, but with language purified into song. Poetry, in this sense, is not a luxury of the cultured, but a survival craft of the spirit.

Her mention of the wishbone is not trivial. It reveals that every hope, every secret desire, was bent toward this one purpose. Just as children pull apart the bone seeking luck, Oswald pulled apart her fear to uncover her calling. The wishbone becomes a symbol of alignment between desire and destiny: she wished not for riches or safety, but for the power to turn life into verse. This persistence of desire is itself a teaching—that to wish, again and again, for the same flame is to affirm the path of the soul.

Therefore, let us take this into our own lives: when fear comes, do not turn away. Face it, endure the night, and when dawn returns, seize the moment to mark what has carried you through. Write your own poetry—whether in verse, in painting, in music, or in the choices you make each day. Let every wish you form be guided not by fleeting wants, but by the deep calling that remains constant in your heart. For it is that calling, affirmed again and again, that will shape your destiny.

Thus we learn: poetry is not merely culture, nor luxury, nor ornament—it is grace revealed at the edge of terror, a vow renewed with every wishbone, and a path laid down by those who endure the long night and rise again to greet the dawn.