My Love is a Tiptoe

My sorrow is a doll 

unstitched, or the soft-worn bear 

whose button eye hangs, or threaded smile has fallen unattached 

at the corner.

My compassion is a needle and thread; 

love, looping through
with time and attention.

My resentment is an email 
never sent, but held in draft. 
collected with others like it (but different). Piled like sand castles waiting 
for the waves to round them down, and 
erase them back into flatness. 

My anger is the back pew of a small church, 
a tight throat and careful eyes that watch blood and wafer pass between the hands 
of people more forgiving than I.

My love is a tiptoe 
in a sleeping house, and whispers of 
     please stay
into the ears of the ones who are dreaming. 

Survivor

Come back

And feel that first sign of movement 

where pin-needles and daggers prick

places once rendered numb or discarded. 

Take the first blink

When your eyes cut from a long empty stare and 

sharpen upon territory for which rods and cones 

feel unqualified.

Open your throat

For a deep, staccatoed breath 

that comes after the lungs have emptied and stayed silent and still,

pretending to play dead.

Wake up!

Listen.  And feel yourself shaking awake.

Wake up!

     You are not dead. 

You are found.

Your eyes are blinking,

Your chest is heaving,

The sun is on your face,

Your cheek is on the sand.

Wake up!

And let your heart pound up against you, to tell you that you are alive.

Breathe

And let your lungs draw in the wind, deep, and move you like a sail
back to your feet.

Stand in the place you are found and then

Walk, courageously, along the tide that took you

     and returned you.

Becoming

She does what she loves.  

Most often.  Most days.  That is how her beauty began, out of love. 

When the seed shell broke it was to allow a more authentic layer to come through.  Many times we see this growth on a vertical ladder or a staircase, or horizontally on a winding pathway.  But real growth  begins from inside, pushing its way out.  A rupture of healing, or a soft sloughing away of the things that are dead or dying.  

It is a break in the seal between the soul and the light. 

The cycle is continuous. Even as she grows, unfolding into the wild, she must repeat this: 

Molt like a snake. 

Root like a vine. 

Die and push back out of the cold again after every bad season.  

She must revisit the center over and over again to discern what it is that has always been and what of that must remain. And then she must put that thing out into the light of the sun and the moon, for all the stars and the other wild things to see, because it is the truth.