Come, Sit With Me Awhile

Come, sit with me awhile.

Tell me who you are.

Tell me what broke you open

and what grew there afterward.

✨

I have time.

I have all the time there is.

✨

I have watched the French Broad carry everything southward,

the lost and the beloved alike,

and I have learned that moving forward

is its own form of courage.

✨

I have sat with the dying

and held what they could no longer carry.

I have sat with the newborn

and marveled at the audacity of that first breath.

✨

Every soul I have ever met

has been a country unto itself,

vast, complicated, gorgeous,

worth every mile of the journey.

✨

You are that country.

You with your scars and your laughter,

you with your long memory and your stubborn hoping,

you with your capacity to love

even after love has cost you dearly.

✨

That capacity is everything.

That capacity is the whole story.

✨

I am overcome by you,

by all of you,

by this staggering procession of souls

moving through their days

with such grace,

such ordinary, unwitnessed, magnificent grace.

✨

Look at what we are to each other.

Look at what we give.

Look at what we keep giving

even when we are tired,

even when we are afraid.

✨

That is the great poem.

That is the only poem worth composing.

✨

You are that poem.

You have always been that poem.