Do You See Me
When you picture me in that small head of downy-soft blonde curls
What is it that you see?
Onyx-framed glasses and splotchy skin, disheveled morning hair all day long
A giant tyrant who sharply says “NO!” every time you just want to chase the cat
Or draw crayon hieroglyphics on the wallpaper or pour the dog food into the sink.
Or do you see dreams in my dark eyes, devotion in my irises
Do you recognize the uncertainty that bends my step
And see my fear when it climbs up my back and beats at my shoulders.
When you see a glimpse of my carefree side as I do a stupid dance while your macaroni cooks
do you sense how much I’ve changed, see the girl I once was
Can you see right through me
When I’m torn and threadbare inside, does your miniature heart feel for me
Do you want me to bronze my eyelids and blacken my lashes
and feel like a powerful woman
Do you watch my hopes dance and lick the wall like a blue-burning flame
Do you yearn for my happiness as the first waves of sleep wash you away from shore at night
Your tiny fingers curled in fists of determination
A warrior for those you love,
Just like me, your mother.
A Goodbye
On the day that I die
I’ll look up at the golden-edged clouds
In the new evening’s sky
Taste the notes of ending on my tongue that mix with the breeze
Fear and relief wax and wane with the sway of the trees
I grasp at a million thoughts, but most tumble away
I’m sad about leaving, but still don’t want to stay.
Challenge
This world clashed us together from the beginning.
I measure and weigh the times that we fall and the times that we rise up again.
They say the first year is the hardest
For two fledgling parents who ambled so long down their own razor-edged paths
every year is the hardest.
Before you, I crumbled before the rust-colored cliffs,
without anything to climb for I drank the gray water of the weary
Now I flex my muscles and stretch my tendons
while the knowledge of what a challenge really is
beats with the blood in my temples and sets my brow
Now I look to the sky with the fierce eye of MUST
and for all the years to come you can see the ruts my fingernails left in the rocks.
Faith
I will beat on the doors of prayer until my heart bleeds and my fists feel numb and tingling
Your education shrieks ‘IGNORANT!’ at me andSome days I almost wish I could agree
but my very soul knows my God can hear me
We cry to God ‘why’ when we are swept away by fire, and wind, and water.
We face death in the most horrifying and heartbreaking ways.
Heartbreak.
Oh, we know heartbreak.
But I read your Word, and you told me there’d be discipline, you said there would be suffering.
You told us of those dark places, the places the sheep should never wander to but find themselves lost in nevertheless.
The heartbreak we have caused you,
Oh, you know heartbreak.
Ask me as many times as you want about the contradictions of the bible. We can argue about it all and I will never have all the answers.
But there is only one answer in me and it's that I can’t divorce myself from the knowledge in my heart. The comfort.
The peace I have found in the darkest tempest, in the unsteady earth of my very. own. life.
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