Love Poem for the Broken-Hearted
Marina Smerling
When the world, as far as you can tell, is falling apart,
A hopeless, mad, unraveling mess
Nations slamming their borders shut in fear of “the other”
Oceans warming, wildfires burning, lowlands flooding, polar bears starving
Our queer brothers and sisters, celebrating wide open to life, gunned down mid-song
And it’s more than your heart can take
And you yourself want to withdraw, or erect your own mile-high borders, or to clench your hands tight into fists and fight back, scratch back, throw missiles back across the border of us/them
Notice
Listen
Can you feel
The unbearable tenderness of being
That would dig a hole a mile deep into this earth
to hide its heartache
Or take up arms and gun down the ones who gun down,
drop bombs on the ones who drop bombs
The part that just.wants.to.make.it.stop.
And doesn’t know how
Pleading “help-me-know-how”
Notice
Your tenderest organ breaking quietly under the surface
Quaking heart
Shaking heart
Whispering “help me” in the dark
For our earth, our people, our creatures that we love
Their salvation lies herein
In our capacity to stay with the quaking, and shaking,
Heaving and staying
With the intolerable loneliness, fear, terror, and shame
The thoughts that we’re “not enough,”
the certainty of that,
the fear of letting another look into our eyes and see it etched in our DNA
Not leaving, not abandoning,
but staying right-here
Granting ourselves mercy,
company
permission to exist
For in the terrorists’ eyes are the same
Loneliness, fear, shame, powerlessness
Longing for a moment of presence, a kind friend, a warm hand to hold
To help digest the unbearable
In here, dear ones
Lies our hope for this world
When you leave yourself,
you leave this world that you love
When you stay,
you breathe new hope into our collective body
May we all dare to stay
And clench, kick, shake and wail
And to find on an in-breath
The earth, her solidness, our own still-beating heart
Already awaiting us
right here
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