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Posts Tagged ‘broken’

How We Are Held

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 12, 2025| 7 Comments »


 
 
When my arms were the most empty,
when my hands were unable to hold anything
and I was most unselved,
that was when I felt the most gathered up
by love. An immeasurable and wildly precise love.
Even when I wanted to push love away.
Even when I felt too broken to be found.
I felt love gather all my pieces.
Not to fix them.
Not to put them back together.
Love simply held every shattered thought
and every ruined dream and cradled me
just as I was. Not because I deserved it.
Just because that is what love does.
I am learning to trust this feeling of belonging
to the world, broken as it is, broken as I am,
learning to trust I need not do a thing to belong.
I do not know how it all works
or why I was able to receive it.
But I can’t unknow this unfathomable truth:
how love holds us when we cannot
hold anything, gentle as silence,
fierce as a flood, true as the breaking itself.
The way the ocean forever holds every wave.
The way the shore forever changes to hold the ocean.

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The Unbroken

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 5, 2024| 4 Comments »


 
 
The walls I thought
would shelter me?
Blown down
by merciless wind.
And I’m too spent
to erect them again.
I can’t stand it, I shout,
my voice nothing
in the gusts.
I can’t stand it,
I whimper.
Yet I am still here.
What is it
that keeps us alive?
Whatever it is,
it’s harder now
to see myself
as separate from it.
When I am broken,
it is what is not broken.
When I cannot stand,
it takes on my shape
and carries me.

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Waxing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 11, 2021| 8 Comments »



Moon broken, my son said
when he was two,
and he pointed east
to the quarter moon.
Mommy fix it.

He believed I could.
I wanted to believe it, too,
wanted to believe
I could fix any broken thing—

the loose button on a doll,
the ripped page in a book,
a scraped up knee,
a tattered dream.

Tonight I gaze
at the low crescent moon.
I have lost my belief
in fixing.

Count me among
the broken things.
And my son is gone.
And my son is gone.
And the beautiful moon slips lower
into the almost dark.

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Urgency

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 4, 2019| 2 Comments »

 

 

 

Again the urge

to bring gauze

to the broken world—

and medicine

and a plaster cast.

Again the urge

to fix things,

to heal them,

to make them right.

Again the chance

to do the work,

which is to look in,

to touch the pain

but not become it,

to see the world

exactly as it is

and still write it

a love letter,

to meet what is cracked

with clarity,

to mirror and grow

whatever beauty

we find.

 

 

 

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When You Ask Me What I Think About the World Today

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 30, 2017| 2 Comments »

 

 

No way to pretend we’re not broken, no way not to see how dazzling we are.

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Practice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 22, 2016| 1 Comment »

 

 

All week it’s been rising,

this longing to fix the places

in me that feel broken—

and then your letter arrives,

a celebration of brokenness,

and I become one of those Japanese pots

in which every crack is repaired

with fine gold.

Sometimes it happens,

we hold for each other

a generous mirror,

and though nothing has changed,

nothing’s the same,

even our fear turns to shine.

 

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