My wonder has a hill in it,
grassy and steep, and a sky
so blue it feels as if I must have
imagined it. There are gravestones
there, some so old and covered
with orange lichen I can’t read the dates,
and other stones engraved with names
of people I love. My wonder has in it
the scent of fallen leaves and the warm
laughter of women, bright yellow feathers,
and a song I once learned from listening to the air.
A candle filled with marigold petals
that stays lit despite the wind
and sometimes a Stellar’s jay flying through.
There is room enough in it for every version
of myself to enter, even the selves
I have yet to meet, even the selves
I might push away, even the selves
I have thought were myself. All of them
slip away. Wandering the hill,
I am certain of little except the fertileness
of not knowing, the necessity for love,
and the gift of being given new eyes.
Posts Tagged ‘birthday’
Oh, Thank You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, cemetery, gratefulness, wonder on November 2, 2025| 6 Comments »
On the Eve of His 21st Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, gratefulness, grief, photo, sadness, tears on September 11, 2025| 18 Comments »
There is a joy that chases sadness
and sometimes overtakes it, as if
the two are racing down a hill,
their shadows sometimes merging—
and this is how a woman looking at a photo
of her son when he was still alive,
his face radiant with elation,
might find herself not knowing
if her tears are made of gratefulness
or sorrow, two parallel emotions
that sometimes twine inside us.
Nor does it matter to her.
Gratefulness. Sorrow. It seems right
she should weep either way.
Both feelings are fashioned from love.
She is here for all of it.
The salt tastes just the same.
The Mother Wonders about Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, love, refuge on July 15, 2025| 4 Comments »
for Vivian on her 17th birthday
I don’t understand how it is that loving you
asks both everything and nothing from me.
Every day since your birth I have nourished
this love with time, with touch, with words,
and loved you the way I was loved—knowing
there is nothing you could do or be that
could make me stop loving you. I thought
I was making a refuge for you, but
every day since your birth, the love
you’ve given back to me has become
my sanctuary, a place I show up exactly as I am,
with bad breath, with tired arms, with a faulty
memory and dirt in my fingernails and trust
you will love me, too. Every day we build together
the nest of love. Once we wove in fairy houses
and reading books and making up secret handshakes.
Now we weave in cinema and long road trips and
floating on the pond. And trust is the glue
that holds the nest together, even as
it changes every day. It surprises me
the nest of love is less a place and more
a spaciousness inside—not somewhere we go,
more something we are, so even when
we’re not together, the refuge is always within us,
a love that asks nothing and everything,
a home that grows as we both continue to grow.
The Un-Journey
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, day, journey, surrender on September 17, 2024| 8 Comments »
—for Hannah
Sometimes a day,
like a mountain,
has no road,
no route,
no trail,
no map,
no right way,
no signs,
no directions,
no guide,
no promises,
no cairns,
no place
to arrive.
Sometimes
the only
step
to take
is not
to take
a step.
How humbled,
how human
we are then.
Naked as birth.
Raw. Unmasked.
So far from
any path
we might
wish to set.
Such a terrible
generous day
to conceive:
when nothing
is asked of us
but to be
the dust
that is
breathed.
The Morning Before What Would Be His Twentieth Birthday, I Dream of My Son
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, dream, grief, mess, mud on September 11, 2024| 9 Comments »
He is young, and it’s raining,
and we are playing on piles
of mud with his sister
the way we often did.
There are channels
of rain water beneath us.
We’re covered in mud.
Mud on our clothes.
Mud on our faces.
Our eyes shine bright
through the mud.
I don’t remember he’s dead.
Our laughter weaves
through the rain
as if it has wings.
And we splash.
How I love
the mess of it all.
When I wake,
I’m too clean,
but all day I feel it,
the way the dream mud
has stuck to my thoughts.
I do not try to wash it off.
The Day Before Your Sixteenth Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, love, mother, story on July 14, 2024| 7 Comments »
We float side by side on the pond for an hour—
you in a tube, me on a paddleboard,
both of us deep in our books.
But even immersed in another world,
I slip more deeply in love with this one
in which I’m your mother and you
my girl and our stories are woven
so closely together that even before
I flip the page of tomorrow, I know
for certain I will love you even more.
Make a Wish
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, candle, friendship, kindness, light on May 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »
for JS
No cake and no you.
Still, I light a candle
on your birthday
and notice the way
one small flame
changes the feel
of a whole room.
I think of your light
and how many
gather around it,
how quietly you invite
the shadows to dance,
how gently one person
can change the world.
For My Brother on His Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, brother, wish on September 30, 2023| 2 Comments »
How many wishes end this way,
like this gossamer froth of milkweed
matted with brittle brown bits.
I think of your beautiful heart,
how soft, how wounded it is.
Lately, almost everything makes me think
of your heart. I pick up
this white milkweed seed. Cradle it
in my palm, detritus and all.
I honor the beauty of your
wish. Matted as it is, bedraggled.
God, it’s so brave to wish.
On the Birthday of a Beloved Who Is Gone
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, death, love on September 10, 2023| 20 Comments »
for Finn Thilo Trommer, September 11, 2004-August 14, 2021
Though you said yes to something
that was not this life, your birthday
is no less a celebration. Though you
are not here to blow out candles,
not here to wake with balloons,
though you are here as disappearance,
though I meet this day with tears,
my heart still rises to revel in ways
your life still changes my life,
your life still changes the world.
It will never be finished, this love.
It will never be finished, this learning
what it is to be born, to die,
to live into ourselves, to choose love
again and again. Though tears.
Though ache. Though crumple. Though clench.
It will never be finished, this practice
of remembering love. Again. And again.
On the Night Before My Daughter Turns Fifteen, I Spend Hours Looking at Old Photos
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, photographs on July 15, 2023| 15 Comments »
And there you are, eating marshmallows
off the gingerbread house
and sledding down the hill to the pond.
You’re in a frothy pink tutu.
You’re covered in mud.
You’re wearing my hot red dress.
You’re Monsieur Lafayette. You’re a ninja.
A pirate. Chinese take-out. A unicorn.
You’re swimming. You’re swinging.
You’re curled up, asleep in my bed.
So many of these moments
I know you don’t remember,
but I do, and I marvel now
how every moment of your life
has made you into you.
There are moments I would snapshot if I could,
the back of your head as you snuggle into me
on the couch in the morning,
the curl of your fingers
as they reach toward my hand,
the sweet lump of you under the covers
before I try to wake you,
the joy in you that slips beyond the frame.