On mother’s day
I rise early
to ask the viola’s
how they slept.
To see the marigold
& verbena shining
velvety with morning dew.
To ask the snapdragon
& the daisy if they have
enough room.
I listen to the chatter
of the birds singing
glory to the maker
of the morning
(as they do every day)
without question
without fail.
I think of how the earth
knows better than I do
how to receive the love
of a God who is both
Father & Mother—
words I am only just
learning how to say.
In the morning light
this day does not feel
tangled up as I know some
(perhaps most) people
feel it to be.
Here there are no
mothers abandoning
their children.
Here there are no
empty wombs.
Here there are no
harsh words spoken
with anything less than
utterly devoted love.
Here there are no
tiny graves;
no buried children
of any age.
Here no arms ache
for the love they used
to hold.
Here there are no
women deceived
or forced into life’s
most terrible choice.
Here there is only
dew on fresh flower faces
& light
& grace
& the God who says
he loves us—
like a mother hen
longing to gather us
beneath protective wings—
like a nursing mother
who cannot forget
the son of her womb
because of the ache
in her breasts—
the nourishment
she must pour out
she cannot keep it
to herself.
And perhaps what I want
to celebrate today
is not me;
someone privileged to be
a mother
to earthly children;
who holds five hearts in her hands
like the abundance
she knows she doesn’t deserve.
A kindness to which
she is neither entitled
nor guaranteed.
Perhaps instead I want
to celebrate like the birds
the King of Creation—
the God of the morning—
who loves me like the child
that I still am.
Who loves me so much
it would hurt to turn away.
Who loved me
to the point of death
& life again.
The Mother God
who is even now
preparing for me
a feast of welcome
& celebration
when I have done
all my wanderings
in these shadowed
lands.
I catch glimpses
of this & more in the shining
dew dropped faces
of the violas in sunshine.
In the tears I know
our truest father
& mother sheds
for the ache
of us all.
Starting into the fire pit last night I found myself thinking back on the disciples. On the grace of God that left the disciples grieving on the Sabbath.
When Jesus died that Friday night they buried his body hastily because it was almost time for the Sabbath. It was their weekly day of rest and there wasn’t time to prepare him as properly as they would have liked. I imagine them sitting around fires and tables that Holy Saturday, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Spared from making plans, from trying to decide what would be next for these who had followed this carpenter preacher around for the past three years. Spared for the moment by the rest they were required to take on the Sabbath day.
I imagine Peter’s grief and repentance at betraying Jesus with his words. And the vacuum of guilt and condemnation that consumed Judas. The tears that John the beloved disciple wept with Mary, Jesus’ mother. Was it hard for them to eat that day? When the last meal they remembered their friend and teacher had told them that true feast was his body broken and blood shed for them. Did they remember how he had tenderly washed their feet? Did all his words suddenly come in sharp relief—his commands to love one another. His words about where he was going and how they could not follow him—at least not yet.
Around the fire pit last night I kept thinking that if the disciples had actually had time to prepare his body properly on Friday, they would not have been back at the tomb on Sunday. How it must have irked them to leave his body less than prepared for a proper burial! How it must have burned, and felt like a betryal. Like the last thing from common decency. Yet, this was the very avenue by which they were to discover his resurrection.
The dark of that Sunday morning, as Mary rose in the dark to go to the tomb of her beloved teacher and friend, she had no idea what awaited her. Perhaps she wept the whole way there, Jesus’ other female disciples with her. Hurrying along in the dark, worry about what they would say to get past the Roman guards stationed at the tomb. Hoping no one stopped them from doing what was the least they could do for this man who has somehow changed everything ever since they had met him.
And then to discover—the stone rolled away. The body, nowhere to be found. An angel sitting outside asking them the strangely obvious question: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, for he has risen, just as he told you.”
How his words must have returned to them in sharp relief! The lightning bolt of the revelation that their Lord wasn’t there—that while they thought every circumstance pointed to him being dead and gone from their lives forever, the very opposite was true.
Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, HE IS RISEN.
I stared down at the plastic box on the dryer. It looked almost just as she had left her. Hair clips neatly arranged in a plastic tray, lotions neatly arranged, brushes with missing bristles still full of her shining white hairs.
“I figured I’d at least let you look at it. I didn’t want to just throw it all into the trash,” my grandpa had said an hour before, pointing me to the box where he had set it upon his arrival at our home for a Mother’s Day barbecue.
It was my own Mother’s first Mother’s day without her Mom. She died at the beginning of the Coronavirus panic-inducing-pandemic, and we weren’t able to have her funeral for months afterwards. The lack of closure was as tangible and palpable as the white hairs left in her hairbrush; as the thought that this box of things was only here sitting on my dryer because she didn’t need them anymore.
Is this all I have left? I thought to myself after everyone had gone. Staring down at the hearts on the metal clip she used to pull her hair back into a half-up-do ever since I was a little girl.
And though I was glad to have her clips, the bath and body works lotion that always was her favorite and reminds me of her—these things are far from an inheritance. They are only the small and ordinary remains of a life lived with beauty.
I wonder if the disciples felt the same way. After they had laid his broken body in the grave where they thought he would stay. Which one of them took it upon themselves to open up his traveling pack? Did they find his extra tunic, the comb for his beard, his fishing lures and knife? Must this not have seemed a far cry from the inheritance he had promised to them?
Did they wonder as I do, in moments of doubt: is this all we have left?
I threw away all of the lotions but one. I kept most of the clips. The brush with the most bristles now runs through my short red hair each morning, and my strands of DNA lie alongside the strands of my grandmothers—some of the only earthly evidence left of a life well lived.
It’s too easy to believe that this is it. Her body burned down to ashes mere hours after I received the news in the pre-dawn of a March morning. Sometimes I think I hear her warbling voice singing the old hymns she loved so much. I see her weathered hands holding open the precious pages of her Bible in her lap, her neck bent so she could see, her chin in her hand, pinkie finger extended to her bottom lip in contemplation—the same gesture I catch myself doing at times.
Getting older was no piece of cake for her. She lived in chronic pain for many, many of that late years of her life. When the pain and the meds made it hard for her to have her daily study time with the Lord she told me once, “I just know that God is teaching me something I’ve never learned before.”
The God of the resurrection will have no trouble bringing her back from the ashes that were once her body—they are only the seeds. And be they scattered on a mountainside here in her Colorado home, or in the wood of Washington that she loved so much, it doesn’t much matter.
I can almost feel her long arms hugging me around the shoulders. Her lips puckered to kiss whichever part of my face was closest. Her voice saying words that were always the honest truth: “I LOVE you.”
Like a blessing. Like a benediction. Like Jesus’ words to his Disciples;
“A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me…Truly, truly I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow with turn to joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
John 16:16-22 ESV
Sometimes what we have left feels like nothing near enough—where was that joy for the morning again, I often ask?
But this is only my shallow perception—my finite mind cannot grasp the weightyness of the glory that is unfolding all around me even now. Nor can I ever hope to fully imagine the glory that is to come.
This isn’t all I have left. There is so much more.
Even so—Come Again LORD Jesus.
Be blessed this Good Friday friends, and as you sit in the grief of the Savior and your own personal griefs that I know weigh heavily still on your own shoulders—may you remember that whatever your “this” is; THIS ISN’T IT.
Those who said
they would help
have only hurt me
more.
The blood
won’t stop
coming & all
these wounds
refuse to be
bound.
But I heard a rumor
yesterday—
it caused my heart
to leap inside
my frail & aching
chest.
They say:
a man—
a prophet—
a healer—
has come to Israel
again.
In the crowd
I hide my face
behind my shawl.
I hope no one
recognizes me—
I don’t belong here.
All who touch me
are unclean &
in this crowd
I could pollute
dozens—yet do I really
seek to touch him? Not him
I say to myself
just his hem—
if I can just touch
the hem of his robe
I know I will be healed—
After all this time
walking alone
perhaps I could be
a mother—
a friend—
a daughter—
again.
When my fingers
graze fabric I feel
the Power working.
My body feels
more whole
than it has in
twelve long years,
but with the joy comes
like a lightning flash
both awe & terror.
What have I done?
But before I can slip
away anonymous &
unnamed his eyes
turn toward me.
His gaze is searching
& he’s asking;
“Who touched me?”
And I, shaking
in a body only
moments made whole,
confess it all
before him.
I thought
he would
chastise me
for making him
unclean—
instead I feel
his hand beneath
my chin, lifting
my eyes to his gaze.
He looks at me
like he knows me
from the top of my head,
to the soles of my feet.
He calls me daughter
& says my faith
has made
me well.
If only everyone
could be seen
like this—
his loving gaze
made well
parts of me
even miracles
couldn’t heal.
Sometimes the heaviness
here
makes it hard
to breathe.
When my lungs
are burning
for breath
I close my eyes
& think about
the wedding feast.
The long table,
laid with fine linens &
fruits of glorious labor—
beloved faces of those
I have wept with,
rejoiced with,
& grieved—
all shining
like the glassen
sea’s surface
in summer.
I hear the wind
blowing fragrance
through the trees
in the orchard.
Joy overwhelms
me & I know
he’s coming.
I lift my eyes
to meet his own &
when he smiles,
I feel it to the soles
of my bare feet
where they plant
themselves in
warm grass,
like a tree
who knows
where she’s
growing.
He laughs
easy as breathing &
like the sudden break
of dawn over mountaintops
I breathe in
the reality that
this sound could fill
every crack,
every lack
every longing
of my whole life.
I open my eyes,
shining with unshed tears
& my heart breaks
to find myself
here
again.
But the burdens
feel lighter
with his laughter
to buoy me.
To the God
of Hagar—
God of wandering
people
in wilderness
places—
We know
that you see—
but we are having a hard time
believing
what we are seeing
and seeing it—
still believing
that you see.
God who has seen
all violence done
upon the earth—
who sees the mothers
and fathers fleeing—
their babies in their arms
only to arrive at safer shores
that do not want them.
God who has seen
every innocence stolen
by the hands of wicked men
some who claim
your name
while inflicting
unspeakable pain.
God who has seen
every victim silenced
by lies and deceit
and the idolatry
of the comfort
of lies so much
easier to swallow
than the bitter
draught of truth.
God who has seen
every genocide,
every leader drunk
on power and prejudice,
who values not
what you called holy
—the imago dei—
of all of human kind.
God who has seen
the ruthless grip of
natural disasters
tearing houses
and lands
and peoples
apart.
God who has seen
the ravages of every kind
of sickness and disease;
we know this is not the first
pandemic you have seen.
God who himself
has felt the sting
of sickness that leads
to death—
the tears of grief
for your beloved,
Lazarus in the tomb
and for the moment
out of reach.
These times are not
“unprecedented”
to you. But
we are still
afraid.
We need
to know—
do you see us
here?
Do you see
every lonely heart
turned lonelier
by pandemic
isolation?
I had days
where I was scared
to make contact—
to smile, to wave
even to those
a street away.
The distance
has felt more
than social.
But God,
these are
small things
I know.
What about
the family members
saying goodbye
with nothing but
a lousy internet connection
connecting them
to a parent
a child
a loved one—
dying in the ICU?
Do you see
how the fingertips
ache to be squeezed?
to be held
one last
earthly time?
Do you see
the fear
in our eyes—
that we
(or one we love)
could be next
to die alone?
Or what about the cries
for justice God?
You’ve been hearing
some version of the these
for millenia—
the oppressor always
has his boot pressed
against the neck
of someone unable
to fight back.
Some of us
are just now beginning
to understand this is
not the promised land.
This is the valley of shadows.
I’ve known it
since I was seven.
And despite
all you’ve done
to heal and redeem—
some days
all I can say is:
“I hate it here.”
Like Hagar
running
through the night
her heart beat
slamming
her short breaths
burning
her shaking lungs.
forced into service
forced into her master’s bed
forced to carry the burden
of the patriarch’s lack of faith
and her mistresses’ abuse—
she fled.
But where
could she go?
Where can we find shelter
in a world that seems
to be tearing always
at some new seam
we didn’t know
was there?
Do
you
see
her
God?
See the tears
track down her
dirty cheeks?
See her face, pale
with fears her heart
cannot hold?
What more
can she take
God?
(What I mean to say is
what more
can we take?)
Is there a spring
after all?
A spring rising up
in this wilderness—
water bubbling
like the sound of joy
from the ground?
Would you speak
as you once did
to Hagar—
to ask us
where have you been
and where are you going?
Will you give
to the wounded,
outcast,
abandoned,
lonely,
bleeding heart—
promise of a blessing?
Can we name our sons
Ishmael—knowing
you have heard
our affliction?
Knowing you have
your eye upon us
even still?
The chickadees
in the barren lilac
out my window
always have enough
to eat—
will you feed us
even here Jesus?
Will it taste
like bread
and water
to know
you
see
us
still?
1. Ash Wednesday
Leaves burned last fall
just when yellows and reds
should have swept us away
with the colors of flame—
Instead aspen leaves dropped charred
from the sky dark at noon.
They crumbled to dust in our hands
while smoke made it hard to breathe.
Thoughts of our own mortality
have never been nearer
than these masks that hide
our faces but not our fears.
Ashes to ashes
and dust to dust—
fears coming nearer like the lines
the fire fighters drew to protect the houses
the roads, the school campus
in the mountains burning down.
Like the lines marked
every six feet with signs
reminding us to keep
our distance.
But it’s the loneliness
that weighs me
down the most
Most days I stare out the window
and wonder—
who are the faithful friends?
the one’s who’ll weather
this storm too and stand
by my side again—
when spring finally comes
when fresh leaves
emerge from aspens
scarred by flames
of last year’s destruction?
It’s Ash Wednesday now
a time to think about
all that perishes—
and what remains.
what Beauty
is already standing sentry
when the pine seeds
are sprouting
in glorious resurrection?
I know the answer
like I know the sound
of his voice—
In this life so full of loss
and lack that burns
like smoke in my lungs
there is only One True
and Lasting Beauty:
One God who put on
fragile flesh to kneel
in the dirt,
to plant himself
like a seed sown in tears
in a borrowed tomb.
Like a pine seed,
awakened by
the flames
just waiting—
to burst forth.
This poem is the first in a series I will be doing, one poem for every Wednesday of Lent. I hope you follow along and that these poems of lack and longing meet you where you are this Lent. To receive updates in your email, click here to sign up for my email list and you’ll be sure not to miss a thing, even if you take a step back from social media for awhile. 🙂
Blessings on you Dear Reader, wherever this Lenten season finds you. And may the only True and Lasting Beauty—meet you there.
I have this fond affection for abandoned places. It’s weird, and feels misplaced every time it pops up, but there it is with the run down old house in need of love (and a roof) on the busy interstate. I feel it again at the sight of a leaning old tree; dead and grey wood worn down by weather and life. I remember the day that old tree finally fell, and that place on the highway felt lost without it.
There’s an old cinderblock house on Highway 287 north that I wrote a poem about. It needs a roof I think, but my engineer husband thinks it needs a bulldozer. He’s probably right.
There’s an old brick victorian house on three neglected acres just north west of the I25 entrance. It has painted green shutters, the window on the upper level is cracked, and sometime down the road someone seems to have built on a ply-wood addition to the side and spray painted it black. The NO TRESPASSING signs don’t intimidate me. I see the place as perhaps it once was; built with love and attention, facing a southern sky, the land around it filled with growing things nurtured and tended by loving and wise hands. There would have been a barn there for the horses. A carriage house perhaps. It would have been on the edge of the town-turned-city; our ever-expanding home. And no one would have dreamed of throwing a rock through the window, or building on a ply-wood addition and spray painting it black.
Last year I went to see my Grandaddy’s farm for what will probably be the last time. One portion is under-contract for sale; another holds a few head of cattle and the fishing pond my great-grandaddy built when he bought the land in the 1930’s. There’s a small shelter nearby where we park that was probably used for hogs I’m told; but now it’s covered in ivy and only holds the click-click-click of the generator for the electric fence. My father points out the field where they used to plant sweet potatoes. I can still remember in my mind’s eye the sight of the old farm house where my Grandaddy was born and raised, which has since been demolished after it became a danger. He shows me the acre where they planted the family garden, and tells me how they shucked corn every 4th of July for as long as he can remember, to put it up for the cool North Carolina winter months.
This all brings with it such wisps of my own childhood memories; like the time when I was young and my Daddy took my brothers and I fishing at this pond. He left the boys with their lines in the water at one place, and took me around to a different corner of the pond. I’ll never forget how he leaned down in my ear and whispered, “This is the best spot. Don’t tell your brothers.”
I remember how when I got older my Dad told me how he used to pull up old wine bottles from the bottom of the pond; relics of my alcoholic Paw-Paw’s day. I remember how my Dad told me Paw-Paw would say, “I’m going fishing,” in the evenings, and how everyone knew what that meant even if they pretended not to. When I asked him if he drank it, he said it had all turned to vinegar by then.
Places left unattended seem to become wild; they go to entropy without some greater force sculpting them towards order and harmony. Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden—I am drawn in by the abandonment of these places. All the memories they hold, both good and bad, past and possible future flash before my eyes as I catch sight of a house nearly drowned in ivy on the side of a North Carolina highway. I can’t help but wonder; Who lives here? Who owns this? When did they leave and why? Is there hope for its restoration? What would it cost?
The neediness of a place draws me in. Perhaps it’s partly the solitude these places seem to afford; like the ghost town of Independence, Colorado—a small abandoned mining town at the top of a mountain pass where once gold was found, and then just as quickly, it wasn’t. I read on the internet that the town was mostly abandoned by 1890, and all but one remaining person left after a massive blizzard in 1899 left the town cut off from supplies. I wonder about the last person who stayed for thirteen years alone at the top of a mountain pass, almost 11,00 feet above sea level. I wonder how he felt, as he watched his neighbors and friends flee to Aspen on homemade skis that February 1899. How did he (or she) survive? By 1912 the town was completely deserted, and I wonder if it was as a result of the death of the last remaining resident, or if he too eventually realized that there was nothing left for him there.
Maybe the reason these places pull me in is because I’m so hesitant to ever believe that there’s nothing left worth saving. Maybe it’s because I don’t want anyone to think that about me. Perhaps I feel a kinship to these lonesome and broken down places; perhaps its the Imago Dei in me longing to bring order and dominion to every lost and abandoned place. Perhaps it’s because I know my heart can’t take any more abandonment myself.
When I was seven years old I lost my church and all my friends in one fell swoop. As a homeschool kid those were the most significant connections I had apart from family; and it’s an ache I still carry around with me more days than I would like.
I don’t like telling you this; for fear you’ll see the broken porch step, the dirt pile under the welcome mat, the loose wiring in the living room, the broken tile on the kitchen floor. The truth is, that I was sexually abused by the son of an elder at my childhood church; and when instead of offering some measurable assurance of space to heal and comfort and justice we were told to simply “forgive and forget”, we left. Sadder still—no one followed us.
Abandonment feels like the sharp sting of acrid smoke in my nostrils; and it has haunted me so thoroughly for most of my life that sometimes I imagine I can smell it when it isn’t even there.
I have been guilty of looking at my friends with a sideways glance—wondering if they are about to dart out the door. I look at my husband this way too; this wonderful man who promised to love me forever ten plus years ago, and hasn’t ever done a single thing to make me doubt his commitment to me since. I play out the scenarios in my mind of how it will happen; how I’ll share too much, be too much, take too much—and then it will be too late.
The fear of being left alone haunts me; I worry about who I’ll disappoint when I don’t have things as together as they think I should. I have seen the looks of fear on faces when I express feelings of doubt in the face of my lifelong faith. I think they think that if I express doubt that maybe I’m lose my faith in God; but the Truth is that I have my eyes and heart so wide open on my best days, that I must continually wrestle the darkness that I witness into the hands of the loving God who is himself everything light and lovely. But it’s a fight. I wrestle constantly it feels like sometimes; and there are dark days when I just don’t even know how to believe in a good and loving God anymore. But he always brings me back—and I’m learning that that is the more important piece.
I know he’s going to mend that porch step in time. He’s already got the broom out to clean under the welcom mat. He’s planning a kitchen remodel and the new tile is going to be so much more beautiful than what has been cracked and broken and left to rot in me. And I believe he longs to do the same in you.
But if you’re like me, perhaps you find it hard to see that God really loves you; that he really wants to make all the broken down and bleeding in you whole and healed and new. Perhaps it feels impossible—because if you weren’t valued when you were young and innocent, how could you be valued now that you’ve grown up and screwed up more times than you could count?
I still wrestle with these doubt too, friend. I get it. But I want you to know something—no matter how abandoned you have felt, you have never walked alone. These broken parts are pieces of your story? They are making way for an eternal weight of glory.
I’ve seen it. I believe it. I know that it’s true. And my prayer for you Dear Reader, is that you would begin to know it too.
A Prayer for our Abandoned Places
Jesus—
You see all that is broken and abandoned in me.
You see where I have placed a pot to gather rain from the leaky roof—
the rugs I use to cover the holes in the floor—
the peeling paint beneath the stack of books on the window sill.
Thank you for making your home with me, even still.
Teach me to trust the shuffle of your soft footsteps on my squeaky floor boards.
Thank you that you love me as I am, yet you love me too much to leave me this way.
Do your work in me O LORD—
Amen
The Anvil
I.
Loss is like
an anvil
sitting silent on my chest.
The only noise comes
when I try
to breathe.
The creaking of my lungs
fighting to expand in this
weighted world
sounds like the rattling
of chains softened
by padded walls.
Words pad the cell:
“She lived a good life.”
“It was her time.”
“She was ready.”
AND IF I COULD ONLY STAND
I’D RIP THAT PADDING OFF THE WALLS
AND DASH MYSELF AGAINST THE COLD AND SOLID REALITY
THAT DEATH IS ALWAYS AN UNINVITED AND GREEDY HAND
AT THE TABLE AND THERE IS NO EXCUSING HIM.
I have tried to move
the anvil
by ignoring it.
Pretending that I believe
padded words
are enough to quench
embers burning
a hole in my chest
where my heart used to be.
But
surprise, surprise!
It didn’t work.
After sitting in the numbed silence
for 100 more years I took another
rattling breath—my lungs like a bellows
on the embers of a heart gone
almost cold as I whispered—
“I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
And the anger lifts the anvil—
throws it broken to the ground.
And I do as I said I would;
tearing padding, dashing
every part of me against the cold
hard stone until
either my bones
or the wall
must break.
II.
Blind and wounded
is this how we come?
Crashing through that solid
wall of reality
my bones turned to powder
my eyes gritty
my nostrils full of dust
& funeral ashes.
Lying under a bright
& open sky—
the beauty sharp
like grief—
at first felt worse
than the anvil
that sat on my chest
1000 years—a weight
where my heart
used to be.
And now this!?
As I crashed through the walls
to the truth that death
was always just a door—
out of the tower
out of the nightmare
out of the Shadowlands
to Here—
where air is breathed
just for
laughing.
(This poem is an excerpt from my poetry chapbook As the Sparrow Flies, a collection of poems about the various forms of grief that come with love.)
Header photo by Yang Shuo on Unsplash
I am shedding my skin—
the old broken down shell
is cracked and sloughing off
my shining shoulders.
I am letting go of the girl
I thought I was last year
two years ago, definitely ten.
Would she recognize me?
Would we be friends?
I’m letting go of those questions
too. They have no place in this pool
where I wash the soot from my body
and watch the way the moon gleams
on my brand new skin.
This coal mine cave turned tomb
For minerals, miners, and me.
Presented to the heat, the flame
as a sacrificial offering.
For what god—I wasn’t sure.
I felt the flames lick my heels
and I screamed until the air gave
out—I couldn’t breathe
and I collapsed as the cave
collapsed and crushed me.
But now I am stepping out
of my skin cracked and scared
like the granite of the mountain side,
and I see the new underneath—
shining hard facets sparkling
in the light of a young moon.
I realize it then: it takes defiance
to believe in joy—to hold both
happiness and sorrow
in your hands at once—
to believe in hope
when the dark is caving in.
I didn’t know it till
the sorrow buried me alive.
I didn’t know till I heard
the canary sing—
reminding me that somehow
there’s still air down here.
Still air in my broken down lungs
crushed beneath worlds of weight
beneath bodies of gods existent
in the image temples of my heart
where I worshipped perfection,
performance and outward shows
of grand love to be praised by man—
Where I bowed to the love of a god
who only loved what I had done
lately and not who I always was beneath
this skin I am shedding. Not who I
was when the cave roof collapsed.
And Oh what Wonder!
the dust clears and I can see
now these were no gods at all,
only toppling stones crashing
before the refiners fire licked
my heels and made me clean.
Now upon the banks of a pool
on the mountainside,
I shed my sodden, sooty skin—
I wipe the dirt from my neck,
and my chest thrums with a new
more solid beat.
Now, beneath the light
of the young moon, beneath
my shed skin, I can see clearly
what I was always meant
to become.
Photo C/O KT on Unsplash
Grace Kelley 