mini ♡

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“We are born of love; Love is our mother.”
― Rumi

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“MOTHER—

Mother—
You lounge on a cloud
Surrounded by God in His absence.

Mother—
I dream
You are always returning.
I wake and wait
For your steps in the hall.

Mother—
Mornings, I hear you puttering.
At night, you mutter and hum over the laundry.
The earth is still warm from you.
I see your needlework in the grasses that sway.
When you were alive, I worried your hair gray.
You cried like a little girl wanting her way.

Mother—
Losing you, my life has grown brittle.
The air has lost all its give.
Nothing surrounds me.
My hands have never been so greedy
For the warmth of your body,
Or my eyes more restless,
Scouring the crowd for your face in the sea.
God is real. The earth perceives us. Ghosts
Roam among the living, bargaining for an hour as flesh.

Mother—
You are a green leaf
Swept from the tree by unseasonable winds
To wander the heavens like a star.
I pray for a day each year when we might collide.
In still water I search for your eyes.

Mother—
How could you have lived once and not forever?
How have we not gone everywhere together?

Mother—
I see you on your cloud,
A shadow above this impossible city.
I hurl my voice at the sky—Mother!
And what answers back is the absence of everything
That isn’t you.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems