I’d like to share a poem that not only features breathing but is entirely about breathing. It’s by the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).
IV/O Breath
Beneath that loved and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really blindly veined,
grieves, maybe lives and lets
live, passes bets,
something moving but invisibly,
and with what clamor why restrained
I cannot fathom even a ripple.
(See the thin flying of nine black hairs
four around one five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common’s bound to be there,
whatever we must own equivalents for,
something that maybe I could bargain with
and make a separate peace beneath
within if never with.
Source: Elizabeth Bishop, from “Four Poems”, Complete Poems, Chatto & Windus 1991
from Elizabeth Bishop