The Water Of The Womb

Written by Britt Wolfe
Poetry By BRITT WOLFE Author

Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe

They told me
blood was everything.

That it ran deeper
than choice.
Than distance.
Than truth.

That it tethered me
to people
I did not choose
but was expected
to keep.

—

They spoke of it
like a promise.

Like something sacred
by default.

Like the water I came from
would always call me back
no matter
what waited for me there.

—

But water
is not always gentle.

Sometimes
it drowns.

Sometimes
it holds you under
and calls it belonging.

—

I spent years
trying to breathe
in places
that never made room for me.

Trying to love
in ways that asked me
to disappear
just enough
to be acceptable.

Trying to honour
something
that did not honour me.

—

Until I learned
there is another kind of blood.

—

Not the kind
you are born into.

The kind
you choose.

The kind
that finds you
in the dark
and says—
stay.

—

My coven.

Not bound by obligation
but by recognition.

By the quiet knowing of
there you are
I have been looking for you.

—

They do not ask me
to be smaller.

They do not ask me
to soften the edges
of who I am
to make themselves comfortable.

They hand me back
the parts of myself
I was taught to hide
and say—
these are not flaws.

These are the reasons
we love you.

—

With them,
love is not survival.

It is expansion.

It is laughter
that comes easily.
It is silence
that does not feel like punishment.
It is being held
without being reshaped.

—

They have poured life into me.

Real life.

The kind that pulses.
The kind that steadies.
The kind that reminds me
I am not too much
or not enough
or anything
I was once made to believe.

—

And I would choose them
again
and again
and again.

Not out of duty.

Out of devotion.

—

So let the water
return to where it came from.

Let it ebb
and pull away
and take with it
everything that asked me
to endure
instead of live.

—

I am no longer anchored there.

I am not bound
by what I was born into.

I am carried
by what I have chosen.

—

The blood of my coven
runs through me now.

Not by birth
but by bond.

Not by expectation
but by love.

—

And it is stronger.

It is deeper.

It is mine.

Keep My Words Alive

If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.

WHERE WORDS MEET MORNING LIGHT
BEGIN EACH DAY WITH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

Every morning at 11:11AM, I send a poem — sometimes soft, sometimes devastating, always true.

💚 Subscribe now to read and breathe and feel along with me 💚

Poetry by Britt Wolfe:

Poetry
A Place Where Nothing Hurts
A Place Where Nothing Hurts

I've been thinking about how much of our lives we spend carrying things we were never meant to hold forever. The weight of expectations, the exhaustion of being understood, the quiet accumulation of things said and unsaid. How easily we lose ourselves in the noise of living, and how rarely we allow ourselves the simple luxury of peace. A Place Where Nothing Hurts is a tender imagining of what it might mean to finally lay everything down. A reflection on the things that remain when the noise falls silent, the extraordinary beauty of ordinary comforts, and the hope that somewhere, somehow, there is a gentleness waiting for us that asks absolutely nothing in return. 💚

Read more →
the Strange Tragedy Of beginnings
the Strange Tragedy Of beginnings

There is something achingly beautiful about the beginning of things, when the future is still an open invitation and hope has yet to learn the language of disappointment. I've been thinking about the distance between who we were and who we become, about the quiet passage of years and the strange tenderness of looking back at moments we once lived without knowing how precious they would become. The Strange Tragedy of Beginnings is a reflection on time, possibility, and the bittersweet privilege of remembering. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about being human is that, despite everything life teaches us, we somehow find the courage to begin again. 💚

Read more →
The Loss of My Life
The Loss of My Life

I wrote The Loss of My Life in the wake of my father's death, trying to find words for a grief that began long before he was gone. There is a particular kind of heartbreak in mourning someone you loved deeply, but whose love could also leave you feeling unseen. It is the sorrow of losing not only the person who existed, but the relationship you spent a lifetime hoping might one day become something different. This poem is about the complicated coexistence of gratitude and resentment, tenderness and hurt, love and longing. It's about the memories I will always treasure, the wounds I am still learning to carry, and the terrible finality of knowing that some conversations will never happen, some apologies will never come, and some stories will remain forever unfinished. Above all, it is about loving someone enough to grieve both who they were and who they might have been. 💚

Read more →
Crossword Puzzles And Fabric Softener
Crossword Puzzles And Fabric Softener

I wrote Crossword Puzzles and Fabric Softener in memory of my dad, who passed away on his 80th birthday. It's about the quiet, ordinary ways love reveals itself, often in moments we don't recognize as extraordinary until years later. It's about the things we keep without knowing why, the small exceptions someone makes just for us, and the questions that remain when a relationship ends before we've found all the answers. Above all, it's about understanding that love can be imperfect, complicated, and sometimes difficult to recognize, but no less real for having existed in the spaces between what was said and what was left unsaid. 💚

Read more →
History Loves To Hate Her
History Loves To Hate Her

Some names are remembered not because they deserved infamy, but because they became convenient. This poem explores the recurring pattern of public blame, forgotten context, and the painful truth that history often chooses its villains before it knows its facts. Somehow, the blame is always hers.

Read more →
The Midpoint Moves
The Midpoint Moves

The Midpoint Moves challenges the idea that moderation is inherently moral. When the political right moves further toward the extreme, continually meeting it in the middle does not hold the centre—it moves it. A poem about the dangerous distance between compromise and permission, and what happens when yesterday’s unacceptable becomes today’s reasonable.

Read more →
Your Empty Message
Your Empty Message

Your Empty Message is a reckoning with a left that speaks fluently about inequality, injustice, and systemic failure while governing too cautiously to meaningfully confront them. It asks what happens when progressive language is repeatedly separated from material change—and the political vacuum left behind is filled by a far right more than willing to turn legitimate anger into fear, blame, and division.

Read more →
No Shame in Survival
No Shame in Survival

There are moments in life when every choice carries a cost, and simply reaching tomorrow becomes the greatest achievement of all. This poem reflects on the quiet courage of survival, and the compassion owed to every difficult decision made in its name.

Read more →
Chemistry
Chemistry

Some bonds seem to appear effortlessly, while others remain forever just beyond reach. This poem explores the sorrow of searching for a connection that cannot be forced, no matter how deeply it is hoped for.

Read more →
Justice Isn't for This Plane of Existence
Justice Isn't for This Plane of Existence

History is filled with unanswered wrongs and unbalanced scales. This poem explores the unsettling possibility that perfect justice was never meant for this world, while gently wondering whether another horizon may yet hold what this one cannot.

Read more →
A regretful Life
A regretful Life

The greatest regrets are not always born from failure. Sometimes they grow from the opportunities never taken, the dreams forever delayed, and the extraordinary life that remained just out of reach. This poem is a meditation on courage, comfort, and the passing of time.

Read more →
A Trail Of Endings
A Trail Of Endings

Every beautiful thing asks the same impossible favour: Please don't let this end. Perhaps the greatest privilege of living is having so many moments worth missing. 💚

Read more →
Destroy It
Destroy It

It is astonishingly easy to break something beautiful. The harder—and infinitely more worthwhile—question is: what will we choose to build instead? 💚

Read more →
Schrödinger's Future
Schrödinger's Future

Tomorrow is the most generous place in existence. Before it arrives, nothing has been lost and everything is still possible. 💚

Read more →
The Surprise
The Surprise

Perhaps the greatest invitation ever offered wasn't to believe, but to wander. 💚

Read more →
Elbows On The Table
Elbows On The Table

The smallest acts of rebellion often reveal the biggest truths. 💚

Read more →
The Questions That Remain
The Questions That Remain

Some losses never stop asking questions. This poem is about the quiet, impossible search for answers after a life has ended, and the way love keeps looking long after there is nowhere left to look. I hope it leaves you holding your loved ones a little closer. 💚

Read more →
Shrunken
Shrunken

This poem was inspired by a feeling that is difficult to describe but impossible to ignore: the sense of watching a life slowly contract. Not through age or circumstance, but through fixation, regret, fear, obsession, or the weight of choices that narrow the horizon until possibility itself seems to disappear. Shrunken is not about any one person or any single story. It is about the tragedy of forgetting how vast the world still is. I hope that, as you read it, you feel both the sadness of that confinement and the quiet reminder that mountains still rise beyond the window, roads still stretch toward distant horizons, and life remains far larger than the cages the mind sometimes builds around itself. 💚

Read more →
The Blast Radius
The Blast Radius

Most conversations about harm focus on the victim and the perpetrator. What interests me is everyone else—the people who inherit consequences they did not create, whose lives are quietly altered by decisions made in rooms they never entered. A single act of violence can travel astonishing distances, reshaping futures, relationships, and identities long after the event itself has passed. This poem explores that invisible fallout and the uncomfortable truth that innocence has never guaranteed immunity from consequence. 💚

Read more →
The Chaser
The Chaser

This poem is about a particular kind of tragedy—not the tragedy of failure, but the tragedy of fixation. It was inspired by the realization that some people spend so much time chasing, comparing, resenting, or reacting that they never fully step into the extraordinary possibilities of their own lives. The Chaser is not really about any one person. It is about a pattern, a temptation that exists in all of us to look sideways instead of forward. I hope that, as you read it, you feel both the sadness of what can be lost to obsession and the quiet invitation hidden beneath it: to stop chasing shadows and begin building something beautiful of your own.💚

Read more →
The Beautiful Terrible Thing
The Beautiful Terrible Thing

I run five kilometres almost every day through a beautiful strip of nature near my home. It has become a deeply meditative ritual—a time when the noise of life quiets enough for ideas, questions, and poems to surface. This poem was conceived on one such run. Surrounded by towering trees, birdsong, sunlight on water, and the intricate beauty of a world that seems almost impossibly alive, I found myself reflecting on a question that has followed me for years: how can a world so breathtakingly beautiful also contain such profound suffering? The more closely I look at nature, the more miraculous existence feels. And yet woven into that same extraordinary tapestry are cruelty, injustice, violence, and heartbreak. The Beautiful Terrible Thing explores that contradiction. I hope that, as you read it, you feel both awe and discomfort—the wonder of being alive in a world so beautiful, and the responsibility that comes with sharing it with one another.💚

Read more →
The Bystanders
The Bystanders

This poem was inspired by a line from Alice Feeney's novel Sometimes I Lie, which lingered in my mind long after I finished reading. It made me think about the role of the bystander—not the person committing the harm, but the person who sees it, senses it, suspects it, and chooses silence. The Bystander is my reflection on the quiet power of courage and the equally powerful consequences of looking away. I hope that, as you read it, you find yourself considering the small moments when a voice, a question, or a simple act of standing beside someone can change the course of a life. 💚

Read more →
The People Pleaser
The People Pleaser

The People Pleaser is about the quiet cost of becoming everything for everyone except yourself. Many people pleasers are praised for their kindness, reliability, and generosity, yet beneath those compliments can live a profound loneliness—the loneliness of being deeply known by everyone except themselves. This poem explores the moment that pattern begins to break. I hope that, as you read it, you feel both the grief of all that was sacrificed in pursuit of approval and the profound relief that comes from finally asking a simple, life-changing question: What do I want? 💚

Read more →
It Happened Later
It Happened Later

It Happened Later is for anyone whose life failed to arrive on schedule. For anyone who spent years measuring themselves against timelines, milestones, and imagined deadlines, only to discover that some of the most meaningful things take longer than expected. This poem is not about giving up on dreams—it is about releasing the illusion that they must arrive on our timetable. I hope that, as you read it, you feel a little less burdened by where you thought you would be by now and a little more open to the possibility that your life is unfolding in its own wise and untidy way. Sometimes the best things arrive later. And sometimes later turns out to be exactly right. 💚

Read more →
Simply Is
Simply Is

This poem was inspired by a simple but surprisingly profound idea: perhaps not everything requires an explanation. So much of life is spent searching for meaning, certainty, and answers to questions that may never be resolved. Yet the natural world carries on without justification. Rivers flow. Mountains stand. Lilacs bloom. Simply Is is an invitation to step, if only for a moment, out of the endless pursuit of why and into the quiet peace of what already exists. I hope that, as you read it, you feel a little less pressure to understand everything and a little more permission to simply be where you are. 💚

Read more →
The Dark Tetrad
The Dark Tetrad

I’ve been reading a great deal about the Dark Tetrad—those intersecting traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism—and found myself wondering what it might feel like to move through the world inside a mind shaped by those patterns. This poem is my attempt to imagine that interior landscape. I hope, as you read it, that you feel unsettled—that slow, creeping chill of realizing you are standing inside a psyche where charm is strategy, intimacy is leverage, and other people exist chiefly as instruments to be played.

Read more →
Carve Your Canyon
Carve Your Canyon

Carve Your Canyon is a poem about persistence—not the loud, cinematic kind we are taught to admire, but the quiet, often invisible kind that changes everything anyway. It is for anyone who has looked at the scale of a dream and felt impossibly small in comparison. For anyone who has wondered whether they are too late, too ordinary, too uncertain, or too tired to create the life they ache for. At its heart, this poem is a reminder that transformation is rarely born of spectacle. It is born of return. Of showing up again when no one is applauding. Of choosing devotion over drama. Because the most extraordinary lives, the most breathtaking art, and the most impossible dreams are so often carved not by force, but by the patient, relentless courage of simply refusing to stop.

Read more →
Fine: I’ll Drag Myself and My Dreams Out of Here Myself
Fine: I’ll Drag Myself and My Dreams Out of Here Myself

Fine: I’ll Drag Myself and My Dreams Out of Here Myself is for anyone who spent too long waiting—for permission, for confidence, for rescue, for the elusive moment when ambition would somehow feel legitimate enough to pursue out loud. It is a poem about creative hunger, late beginnings, and the furious clarity that comes when you realize no one is coming to hand you the life you ache for. At its heart, this is not a poem about effortless triumph. It is about grit. About dragging your dreams forward bloodied if necessary. About refusing self-erasure. About finally choosing yourself, your voice, and the stories burning inside you—even if the path forward is messy, exhausting, and entirely self-made.

Read more →
Dead Horse
Dead Horse

Dead Horse is about the painful moment hope finally collides with reality—and the realization that some forms of love do not die dramatically, but decay quietly over time while hope keeps mistaking absence for possibility. This poem explores nostalgia, grief, and the deeply human instinct to keep trying long after something has already ended. At its heart, it is a reckoning with the difference between love and longing—and the devastating clarity that sometimes the kindest thing we can do is stop trying to resurrect what has long since gone cold.

Read more →
I’ve Got My Hands Up
I’ve Got My Hands Up

I’ve Got My Hands Up is about the kind of surrender that does not come from weakness, but from exhaustion, clarity, and the hard-won understanding that some cycles survive only through continued participation. It explores the moment a person finally steps away from a dynamic that has demanded endless emotional labour, hope, and self-sacrifice, and discovers that peace is not found through victory, but through absence. Rather than framing surrender as failure, this poem reclaims it as an act of self-preservation—a quiet refusal to keep offering oneself to something that only knows how to wound.💚

Read more →
Britt Wolfe

Britt Wolfe writes emotionally devastating fiction with the precision of a heart surgeon and the recklessness of someone who definitely shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects. Her stories explore love, loss, and the complicated mess of being human. If you enjoy books that punch you in the feelings and then politely offer you a Band-Aid, you’re in the right place.

https://bio.site/brittwolfeauthor
Previous

We’ll Handle It
Next

Work In Progress