Could they ever be enough,
these stumbling attempts
to bring kindness to an aching world?
Enough, this holding the door for a stranger,
this saying I’m sorry, this holding a place in line?
How could it be enough, asks the ache,
when today I saw the photo of the mother
holding the starving child in Gaza,
his brown legs as thin as my wrists.
I am sick with helplessness.
What does it mean, enough?
Beside me on a bench,
a man I have never met is humming.
His tune blooms like a sun in my chest.
The warmth twines with the beat of my question,
How could any small act be enough?
Until the child in the photo and all children
are safe and fed and loved and held by loving mothers
who are safe and fed and loved
and held by loving others who are safe
and fed and loved—until then,
how could anything ever be enough?
The old man beside me has started to sing.
His eyes are closed, and his
low gentle voice braids beauty
into everything around him.
Even the questions that will never
have answers. Even this terrible ache.
How deeply I want to believe
it is not too late to save this world.
Posts Tagged ‘helplessness’
In the Airport, I Wonder about Enough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged enough, fear, helplessness, kindness on July 28, 2025| 8 Comments »
Loving You No Matter What
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, healing, helplessness, joy, loss, rainbow on March 3, 2024| 10 Comments »
for Dan
Still, this longing to help.
I want to write the impossible poem,
the one that would make what is terrible
less terrible, want to give you
something useful as a tool belt,
practical as long division, hopeful
as the grace that rises out of our losses
as surely as sunshine rises
at the end of our valley.
There was that cold March morning,
years ago, when you grabbed my hand
and pulled me toward the street
to see a rainbow of ice crystals
glowing bright in the east.
An ice rainbow! you shouted,
your joy so feral, so real it became my joy.
God, how I needed it.
That. I want to give you that.
*
Temporal
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged help, helplessness, kayleen, ocean, ritual on October 20, 2022| 7 Comments »
for Kayleen
As the tide rose and the waves grew nearer,
she took a stick and drew in the sand
a small labyrinth. In the center
she placed a dried tangle of roots,
some sodden gray feathers,
and the broken open shells of oysters.
White stone at the entrance.
Warm sun on our skin.
On the short path, we wrote with a stick
the names of people and places we longed to heal.
All around us the whirling of dark sea birds
seeking higher places to land.
All around us the sound of waves crashing on rocks,
sound of cliffs slowly eroding into sand.
Emerging Self-Portrait
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged helplessness, love on February 12, 2022| 9 Comments »
I know now myself as helpless—
helpless the way a rake
is helpless, helpless as knife, as needle,
as match, as pen is helpless.
I know what it is to not function,
despite potential, despite history.
I know how it is to lose all agency,
though once I could stitch,
could fix, could bring light.
I know can’t.
I know out of the question,
infeasible, undone, no-go.
Unable to speak. Unable to rise.
This was the moment when love arrived,
love with its ten thousand hands,
love with its perfect skeleton key
to enter every door of me.
Not that I asked.
Not that I deserved it.
Not that I said yes.
But love arrived on grief’s strong wings
and I, a sapped and broken thing,
began to know myself as free
dependent on a skillful hand,
began to trust as love turned me
toward what I most wished not to see,
began to feel myself as love.
Floral Rx
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, flowers, help, helplessness, medicine, mother, poem, poetry on July 23, 2019| 5 Comments »
Because I cannot fix her heart,
I plant flowers in the two empty pots
on my mother’s high rise patio.
She’s always loved flowers around the house—
peonies and petunias in Wisconsin,
succulents and larkspur in Colorado.
She taught me when I was a girl
how to deadhead the plants
to produce more blooms,
how to make the snapdragon
open its reptilian mouth, how
to tell the story of Cinderella
by carefully dissecting the bleeding heart,
how to make touch me nots spit their seeds,
and how a few flowers around the home
bring immeasurable joy. And so
I pick out white and blue lobelia and
a soft gray vine and a hot pink begonia
and other flowers and vines I can’t name
and we sit on her patio together
in the late afternoon sun
and arrange the potted plants.
There is something about planting flowers
together that changes the way
you see the flowers—the same way
a soup tastes better when made
by someone who loves you—
and I thrill to think of her
looking out the window and seeing
the bright red geraniums surrounded
by purples and blues and greens
and thinking to herself, wow,
that girl really loves me, and
surely, surely, though it won’t
fix her heart, surely it will do some good,
those draping pink petunias
so familiar, so new.
What We Can Do
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged help, helplessness, love, mother, poem, poetry, step mother, tea on May 22, 2019| 2 Comments »
Because I can’t make things better,
I offer you tea. I am grateful when you accept.
The night holds us both
as we sit in the kitchen,
your voice a small boat
in an ocean of ache.
Because I can’t fix the problems,
I cover you with a blanket
when I see you are shivering,
though I know your shudders
have little to do with cold.
Still, it feels good when you pull
the white throw around you,
as if for the moment you’re protected.
I think of the Queen of Sheba,
how she learned to be grateful
for falling. How, in the dark,
she found her own light within,
then rose up and shared
this pearl with the world.
Because you are hurting,
I listen to you, would listen
all night, would listen all week.
I offer my whole attention.
And as you find in yourself
the light that is there,
I marvel as you marvel
at your own wisdom, your
own strength.
I listen. I nod.
I pour you tea.
With No Shoulder to Pull Over
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged deer, driving, helplessness, poem, poetry on August 28, 2015| 1 Comment »
the deer beside the highway
struggling to stand on broken legs
has been dead four days
and still I try to think of ways
I might save it
What We do When We Don’t Know What Else to Do
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged helplessness, parenting, poem, poetry, sickness on November 8, 2014| 3 Comments »
All day the mother
holds the ailing girl.
All day I imagine invisible
hands to hold
the mother,
to wipe her tears,
to lift her head
out of the darkness
of her own hands,
to guide her eyes
toward any small
beauty—a wisp
of laughter, a scrap
of sky. I imagine
for her a voice
that hums a soft hum
in her ear when she
is too disheartened
to pray. I imagine
a soft light that
might make the darkness
not quite so dark. I
put that soft light
inside her.