I won’t tell her it is up to her
to repair the broken world.
Perhaps that comes later
with pen or needle, pointe shoe or song.
But for now, the thing to do
is to sit together in the broken world
and feel how it is to be broken.
To let shame sit with us.
Let grief sit with us.
To feel the sharp nails of fear.
It is not wrong to feel small,
to feel frightened, to be lost.
Nor must we feel these things alone.
So for now, I sit with her
in the brokenness
with no tools, no salve,
no metaphor of redemption.
It is not enough, perhaps
to meet brokenness
with nothing but love
and breath and a willingness
to be nowhere but here,
but in this broken moment,
it is everything.
Posts Tagged ‘love’
On a Night When My Daughter Is Struggling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, daughter, love, mother, presence, struggle on November 8, 2023| 18 Comments »
Dactylography
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, fingerprint, heart, love on November 7, 2023| 6 Comments »
Just when you think you know who you are,
you take a closer look at your heart
and notice it is marked
with the whorls and loops and arches
of everyone you’ve ever loved
and everyone who has ever loved you—
those who left you, who broke you,
and those who still charm and nourish you.
As if the heart’s reason for being
is simply to be shaped and reshaped
by the hands of the world.
As if the detectives of love
could visit your heart
with their fingerprint powder
and lifting tape and unfold the mystery
of how you became who you are,
fashioned by the uniqueness of others,
discovering your heart
is not a crime scene at all,
but a rare and incomparable work of art.
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?
On a Day When I’m Sure Words Won’t Make Things Better
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Jane Hilberry, love, poetry, words on October 27, 2023| 10 Comments »
for Jane Hilberry
That is when I arrive at the home
of my college literature professor.
She welcomes me in and serves me fennel tea—
slightly bitter, slightly sweet—
and amidst talk of art and anxiety,
vulnerability and the longing
for a teacher who will stretch us,
she serves me hummus, thin slices of cucumber,
olives and plump green grapes.
She recites by heart a poem about Love
inviting in someone who feels unworthy.
And the table where we sit becomes Love’s table,
and oh, sweet alchemy of syllable and silence,
I’m opened by words written centuries ago.
They slip in my cells and warm me, transform me.
I dog-ear the moment so I can return
when I again forget what words can do.
From Too Far Away
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, love, nearness, parenting, touch on October 8, 2023| 12 Comments »
To hold you the way
the shore holds
the river, this is how
I want to hold you—
that present, the way
skin holds the sweet
peach, the way lungs hold
air—that tender, that
gentle, that tight. Instead,
I hold you now
the way sky holds clouds—
too spacious, too distant,
too far, far away.
I want whisper near, breath
to ear, nigh as lullaby, want
cradle close, praise
close, soothe close, love
close, as if touch could make
everything right, want dream
close, promise close, close
as prayer, close as your
tear to my cheek.
Love Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, crow, introvert, love, song on October 6, 2023| 5 Comments »
We think only of the one-note racket,
the sharp, harsh caw of crow that claws at silence
in warning or begging or a rallying cry.
But the crow, too, sings—
not like the Romeo warblers,
so that all can hear, no—
it blends soft cooing and rattles and growls
to woo as it nuzzles and ruffles and bows,
as if the crow knows that some songs
are better when shared so close
that the only one who can hear them
is the one for whom they are sung.
Tumbling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fall, grief, help, love on October 5, 2023| 9 Comments »
When everything’s falling,
when everything’s broken,
when all is ravel and rubble
and ransacked and ruin
and the world is a stuttering,
guttering blunder,
a plundered and ravaged thing,
that is when wonder arrives on the wings
of forgiving, and living arrives
on the wings of the dead, and
devotion arrives in the wreckage
of loss. And if to love
is to risk being tumbled
and fumbled and wrung out
and sprawled, to love
is also to trust there are hands
that will raise us,
amaze us with kindness,
calm hands that will lift up
our hurt-heavy hearts
as if it they’re as light
as red leaves in the fall.
How the World Goes On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, milkweed, softness, survival on October 2, 2023| 10 Comments »
There’s the burr that relies on brittle prickers,
the cheat grass with sharp and spiky barbs,
and then there’s the milkweed
that attaches its seeds to gossamer fluff
and spills forth in an ecstasy of diaphanous floss,
white puffs of wish-downy, dream-gauzy,
breeze-easy lushness. Oh, heart,
this, too, is what survival looks like—
an almost impossible softness
that gathers light in silky froth,
that entrusts itself to the wind.
An Incantation for My Little Brother’s Pillow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, family, love, pillow, sister, support on September 19, 2023| 4 Comments »
(on the night before a difficult day)
Because I can’t be there now to hold him,
I will my brother’s pillow to be more soft,
will it to offer him the deep magic
no pillow actually owns—will it
to bring him dreams in which
the light is gold and the air
smells of dark violets and
white trillium like it did
when we were kids.
I want his dreams
to feel so real, so
full of love he
wakes with
a smile as
inevitable
as today.
Sitting Quietly in the Night for Twenty Minutes while Nothing Happens
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, nothing, quiet, sign, stillness on September 11, 2023| 8 Comments »
Perhaps I wanted a sign—
an owl call. A meteor.
The brush of an invisible hand.
Instead, I got a sky full of stars
and an ear full of riversong
and the certainty that no matter
what happens or does not happen
in the world outside of me,
there is always, inside me,
a love that grows and changes.
Is it strange now, I am grateful
for nothing—the nothing
that teaches me
the most important thing of all.