This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.Mindfulness is hardly a new idea—when have we not wanted to live more vividly in the present?—but the search for a balanced life has never required so many devices. The word itself has become something of a catchall recently, calling forth an entire industry of platforms, wearable tech, and wellness gurus. Poetry predates all of our meditation apps—and its capacity to immerse the reader in the moment still promises a greater payoff than any smartwatch. A poem tracks our most important data—what we see and hear, what we feel and experience—but not with the intention of creating an optimized version of a human. Rather, poetry addresses one of the root causes of unwellness: a feeling that our own life has somehow gotten away from us.The poet and teacher Linda Gregg, whose poem “The Last Night in Mithymna” was published in The Atlantic in April 1989, has said that poetry comes from the “resonant sources” of a human life: “your long family life, your political rage, your love and sexuality, your fears and secrets, your ethnic identity—anything.” Without the impress of experience, she wrote, poetry is tantamount only to a kind of “manufacturing.” Accounts of her influence remind me of what I love about teaching poetry: the conviction that what you are doing matters for unearthly reasons that have to be taken on faith, not tested for market value. Gregg was, her students and readers attest, a true believer in poetry. Her poetic style is both restrained and exuberant, classical and modern, as in these lines from a poem titled “Let Birds”:I will never give up longing.I will let my hair stay long.The rain proclaims these trees,the trees tell of the sun.Gregg often draws inspiration from the Greek landscape, particularly Santorini, where she lived with the poet Jack Gilbert. In “The Last Night in Mithymna,” Gregg takes us to the Greek island of Lesbos. Someone is alone in a bedroom at night, looking up at the moon in the sky:Wind heaving in the trees.My room quiet and warm.Me on a thin mattresslooking at the full moon.The sky black around her face.Poems about the moon may be as old as poetry itself. Mary Ruefle supposes that “lyric poetry begins with a woman on an island on a moonlit night, when the moon is nearing full or just the other side of it, or on the dot.” Lesbos is most famous for another poet who left us fragments about the moon. But unlike Sappho, Gregg is not pining away. This poem doesn’t cry out for lost love or lost time. She’s not sharing the existential terror of Walt Whitman’s anguished child on the beach at night, worrying whether the clouds will cover the face of the moon forever.Gregg’s poem is about satisfaction. Its beguiling task is to utter the syllables of happiness, to describe, in various ways, a state of being in which Gregg is “content at last / with this world that matches / my life inside and out.” The poem moves between moments of balance. The moon is not a metaphor for mutability, as it has been for other poets; it is a tether for her gaze and a mirror to her face. But how can a poem be about rest, satisfaction, contentment? At the most obvious level, a poem has to start and end somewhere, and presumably cover some ground in between.Gregg solves the problem with what she leaves out of her sentences: the verbs. There is no complete sentence in the entire poem until the last three lines:The cloth over the broken windowswells and goes flatand swells again.Instead of actions, Gregg describes positions. As the poet settles herself in the space of the room, so too does the reader begin to cultivate a similar self-awareness. By the middle of the poem—“Heave and renewed heave / inside and out”—I’m conscious of my own breath moving in and out. Gregg has brought me into the poem. We’re aligned with the moon, the cloth over the window, the wind in the trees. This kind of mindfulness is contagious. When we get to the end of the poem, and to that patch of warmth on the bare ankle, Gregg has taken our breath away—and returned it to us.