As if the whole world depended on it
I nestled deeper into your warmth,
made myself soft as morning light,
soft as a lullaby, softer than that,
as if wars could be stopped and
peace achieved if only I could
make of my flesh a place so safe
you could sleep.
Posts Tagged ‘tenderness’
After the Nightmare
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, love, nightmare, sleep, softness, tenderness on March 10, 2024| 2 Comments »
Falling All the Way In
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, eternity, happiness, moment, mother, tenderness on January 2, 2024| 7 Comments »
Late, and I lie on the couch,
my head in mom’s lap,
eyelids heavy as she pulls
slender fingers through my hair,
and I am more loved
than lost, more soft
than strong, more flesh
than worry, more no self
than self. I am not
thinking of happiness,
which is, perhaps,
the truest kind of happiness.
The moment loses any lines
that might try to define
what a moment is
until all is suffused with eternity
and tenderness is uncontainable.
Her hands move slow
and the room is quiet
and the night is a nest
big enough to hold us all.
Into the Questions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, conversation, love, love your enemy, pain, tenderness on November 3, 2023| 13 Comments »
I needed today the soft voice of the man
from Bethlehem saying,
Put yourself in the pain of others.
Not in their shoes, but in their pain.
I needed to see his eyes
when he said it is olive picking season
and the families are too afraid
to go to the orchards.
I needed to hear it is the hardest
his life has ever been,
needed to hear his fear, his anger,
his willingness to wonder
again and again,
What does it mean to love your enemy?
I needed to see the open face
of the man in Israel as he listened,
needed to hear his gentle tone
as he rejected the phrase us vs. them.
Needed to hear the resolve in his voice
as he called for creating an us together.
And because in the arms of terror
these two men find ways to love,
I invite a war into my heart
and imagine myself on both sides,
imagine the ache that fuels the rage.
I don’t have to imagine fear, distrust.
It is in all of us, this war,
not somewhere far away.
It is for all of us to ask in every interface,
How do I love my enemy?
How do we become an us?
Learning to Be Soft
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, softness, tenderness on September 18, 2023| 5 Comments »
for my father
He was a large man, but soft,
his body no longer chiseled
from football, from youth.
To be held by him
was to be enveloped,
to be cradled, to feel wrapped
in his presence. He was soft.
Except, of course, when he wasn’t.
I had seen his anger turn steel,
turn sword. I knew the full weight
of his no. Perhaps that is why
I knew the great value of how soft
he was with me. I was shaped
as much by his tenderness
as I was by the firmness of his rules,
shaped by the warmth in his voice,
shaped by his gentleness
when I confessed my darkest shame.
One night, when I came to him, broken,
scared of the ways I had hurt others
and myself, he did not rail,
did not blame, did not speak in claws
or spears. He spoke in gauze,
in salve, in velvet cushion,
and though it would be years
before the wounds were healed,
the healing began that night.
In softness.
I remember, even now,
how he held me—
how his softness invited my own.
How I still feel him, holding me—
his softness, my softness.
our strength
The Sublime
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, intimacy, lice, tenderness on September 30, 2022| 5 Comments »
In the middle of the night
in a tiny well-lit kitchen
in the middle of a city
known for violence,
my father spent hours
combing my hair
looking for nits,
meticulously pulling through
the toxic shampoo.
The hours passed
with tenderness.
I was grateful then,
but could not know
how sweetly I would come to recall
his patient hands, his quiet devotion,
his exhaustion, my exhaustion,
could not know how
years later I would treasure
those dark hours
when the sirens
blared through the window glass
and hour after hour
came to pass.
An Open Thank You Letter to Kristen Who Works at the Cemetery
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cemetery, compassion, labor day, tenderness on September 24, 2022| 14 Comments »
Her smile was clear sky, was green grass,
was slender stream of waterfall.
Her smile said, You are welcome here.
Her smile said, You are not alone.
She waved to me as I climbed the hill
to sit by the grave of my son and she offered
to water the flowers I’d brought from the garden.
Her offer was pink snapdragon, was orange marigold,
was golden calendula. Her offer said,
There are some things we can do.
Her offer said, I see you.
Thank you, I said. Thank you
for taking care of this place.
I looked around at the trim lawn,
the lovely, well-cared for space
where we bring our dead.
She shrugged and smiled and said,
We love Finn, and backed away,
her right hand pressed to her heart,
her eyes embracing mine.
There are moments so flooded with tenderness
every wall around our heart collapses
from the beauty of it,
and we are left wet and trembling, like newborns.
There are moments when we are so naked
love enters us completely, shakes us from within
and wrecks us, and there,
in the rubble of our defenses
we fall so deeply in love with life,
with the goodness of people,
we are remade.
When I left, she blew me a kiss.
I caught it. Twelve hours later,
I still cradle that kiss in my hand.
As We Sang the Hymn at My Father’s Funeral
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, father, grief, tenderness on July 12, 2022| 14 Comments »
I couldn’t say why that particular hymn
made me cry—not that I am averse
to weeping—but when love broke me open
with hot, relentless tears,
my daughter beside me reached
to hold my hand and leaned into me
and I bloomed into wild gratefulness.
Grief comes with its arms full of blessings.
I am not grateful for the loss,
but there is so much beauty in how the world
rises up to hold us—cradles us with kindness,
cradles us with song. There is so much good
in how grief asks us to be tender with each other—
teaches us to reach, to offer comfort,
to receive comfort, to connect.
In a world where we crave beauty,
we learn we are beauty,
our every word, our every touch
a building block that makes the world.
Remember This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged generosity, Heartbeat, softness, song, tenderness on April 22, 2022| 6 Comments »
for Merce & Bert & Heartbeat
It is true that anger, that betrayal,
that loss, but it is also true
that one day you might follow
a map to a high desert clearing
where there is a home
that runs on sunshine and rainwater,
and the floors are the color
of autumn leaves, and the beds are warm
and soft, and generous strangers
feed you thick soup and dark greens,
warm bread and good wine,
and as the clouds all around you lift,
you find yourself surrounded by song
and the love of good women and
the ripeness of years and you know yourself
as yet another soft animal—
like a rabbit or a fawn—a being
blessed to exist without claw,
without fang, a being blessed
for now to label this tenderness life.
Another Reason to Be Kinder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindness, news, tenderness, war on May 17, 2021| 2 Comments »
Somewhere I’ve never been
reaches across the ocean
and wrenches my thoughts.
I don’t try to push it away.
I let the ache in,
let sorrow do its terrible
work. It slices in
deeper than I want it to,
but I do not resist.
All day I think of the small child
being pulled from the rubble.
All day I think of the many hands
reaching for the small frightened body.
All day, I am softened by
grief, ravaged into tenderness.
Though It’s Rusty from Lack of Use
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kitchen, love, partnership, tenderness, vulnerability on February 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Today I wish I were a potato peeler,
able to remove the outer layers of myself,
able to shave off any toughness I’ve developed
to protect, to safeguard, to shield. I want to give
myself to you, the inner sweetness,
the tenderest parts. I want to unpeel
any husk, any rind, any barrier
that would keep you from the heart
of me. I want to meet you vulnerably.
Today I want to take the long thin blade
and make ribbons of my resistance,
make strips of my defenses and watch
them fall like burlap veils. And if I cannot
find the courage to be the one who peels,
let me put the tool in your hand. I’m afraid,
but I am ready. Be sure, love. Be quick.