Greater Things Than These

I dedicate this to the invisible parts of me of you, of the stranger on the street, of your father and your mother, brother, sister. I sing the shuddering in your soul you don when you peer at the dangerous parts. When you catch glimpses of the chasms that have threatened to choke you down. This is a memorial to the words you can’t say. Stories you can’t tell. To your dark and drenching habits. To the godless measure in you. To the neglect of your utterness. Those temptations to take your life. To the time you fell in love with a man. That time you lost the girl of your dreams because you dreamed too tight. The days when you tried to gain the world just so someone would see your soul. Who would I not dedicate this to? My first love? My latest love? My next heartbreak? To the sunshine-memory of my grandmother? To the child in me? The child who has needed so badly – who reached with such need in his hands– the butterflies and angels have fled his desperate, outstretched fingers? To this child who, when his cries were outdated by pencil marks on the doorframe, learned to write poetry instead of shedding tears? To you? You who have such a beautiful shadow. You who would unthread it from you, cast it off. Abandon it. You who are hiding a glory, won’t you open to show your pearl? Oh but you’ve never looked at it, have you? How beautiful your shadow is? It has a sap-like sweetness in its taste – and the tartness of your truth. There is a chanting from your soul – ancient, as a sound in the catacombs. My charis and my caritas – my grace and my love. It’s for you. For it is grace that sees beauty in what’s broken. Love traces the boundaries of what’s bent. I see you, sweet shadow. This is a love letter to all that has destroyed me in my life.