Tag: fragility

Compassion

On By Anna EastlandIn Friendship, motherhood, Poetry4 Comments

Let it go, little mamma.

You have deeply entered their pain,

lived it with them,

prayed and suffered.

Their burden is not yours.

You can love

but you cannot hold the whole world

in your heart.

Don’t try to steal God’s job.

Only He, the eternal one,

can bear all the world’s suffering

without breaking to pieces…

Your call now,

is to go dig in your garden

and plant flowers of hope

in the simple brown earth.

Your call is to smile again

and find joy in the little gifts of each day.

Tears have washed you clean.

Now, little mama,

let it go,

trust more,

be silly and laugh again.

Bodies of Water

On By Anna EastlandIn Poetry8 Comments

The trees are so stable,

their moods have such endurance.

They hold on for months

to the bare bitterness of winter,

the silence,

the absence of even a rustling leaf.

Then the trees embrace the sweet joyfulness of spring

in a long coquettish smile,

a blossom-blush lasting months.

Afterwards, the trees sail into the smooth serenity of summer,

wearing their regal wreaths with proud satisfaction.

Even the flaming, flickering colours of fall flash across their faces for months,

the trees, with their moods more stable than mine,

for I am but a tiny body of water

wrapped in skin.

My thinly guarded surface subject to tremors of wind,

the harassment of a sudden hailstorm

or the steady pounding of rain.

I’ve been know to get icicles in my eyelashes

tears of pain frozen before fully released.

Some things are better to let go of quickly.

In all this variable moodiness,

this passionate intensity and depth of feeling,

I am not alone,

for are we not all but small bodies of water

(97% H2O)

wrapped in skin,

the tides in our hearts tugged about by not just the moon,

but by the moods of all the other bodies of water

bumping around us

in this space

that is earth.