They say that grief is love with nowhere else to go--
--what else, then, is love,
But grief that's found a purpose?
This work of making a home cannot disentangle them, sometimes.
We have cowered alone in the dark,
And so we light our windows with hearth-fires that sometimes burn
Too brightly for these four little walls,
Desperate to warm even those we cannot fit inside.
We have drifted, unmoored, through this harsh world,
And so we teach ourselves the knots to weigh anchor
At any port of this perpetual storm,
Calling this ship to safety with a hundred different crews in a thousand different tongues.
We have bled our every fear from the inside out,
Pierced by the sharpened tips of our circumstance,
And so we grow lavender and aloe vera,
And wrap poultices with a too-practiced hand.
There is something, always, of that which we've lost
In the way we embrace those which we were lucky enough to find.
We can but hope that our bowed backs have built these humble walls
To last, if only for a little while.