You, My Love (My Life Poem for Emily)

You, My Love

You inhabit me my love

Grow deep and young inside me

Like a sapling

You sink your roots

They wander

and wonderfully

entangle me my love.

You transfuse me my love

My blood is no longer my blood

For you are present even there

Flowing

Ebbing

Beating

Searching out

my innermost places my love.

You have taken up residence my love

In the furthest reaches

Of the slumber of my sleep

You run with me

Your hand in mine

In impossible places

In surreal dimensions

of my dreams my love.

You come to me my love

A smile that creases my face

An echo of your joy

Surprising me

In the midst of my day

Memories of you

Flash and burn

Images of you

flickering and searing across my mind my love.

You, like a spirit my love

Like the inside of my soul

That I never knew

Before you

Who pulses now always

Inside of me my love.

You, embodiment of answered prayers my love

Extension of grace

Shining down upon me

Soaking into me

Seeping into my every thought

The crown upon my head my love.

You are there in the morning light my love

In my waking moments

I reach for you

I am drawn by the immeasurable gravity

Of your love my love

Against you

Amaranthine rock my love.

You infuse laughter in my life my love

You peal

And beckon me

Your song dances

Your voice

Clarion

Notes floating

And leaping

Whirling

And washing over me my love.

You abide restlessly in my heart my love

Always increasing

Pushing me further

Multiplying passion

Never ceasing

Insatiable hunter

Of my heart my love.

Always always always my love

You will remain the lover of my youth

As we grow old and everything around us decays and rusts

For you and I my love—nothing alters

For you my love

Are Beauty, eternally defined

Tattooed kisses accumulating overlapping everlasting

Across the story of my life my love.

You, the radiant carrier of life my love

Your belly swollen and growing 

Your face beaming and golden

You, emerging and evolving

Into an even higher form of beauty 

Me, falling deeper and deeper into you 

You, Possessor of generations, my love. 

You: succor, nourisher and protector, 

Our babies cling to you

Like vines they surround and grow to you. 

Pillar of strength and zenith of grace

Your love refuses to ebb and only grows

Washing over, sustaining, and imbuing protection

You are the sun and your gravity immense

Pulling us deeper into the chasms—of your love,

Mother and lover of our children my love.

Keeper of the worries, my love

Your heart is open and bare 

where my own toughens

You mother and love without a shield

Absorbing everything 

every tear, every cry

every scraped knee and bruised heart

you take on as your own

Carrier and champion of our hearts , my love.

Beauty amplified and multiplied

You exist outside yourself 

Like a spirit

Each smile on our children's faces

Every sparkle of their laughter

 is your own

Their kisses, their shared embraces exist

Because your beauty and grace seeps 

Into their very core, my love

You my love

Are me

And I

am you.

my love.
We
My Love
We.

The Girl on a Train: Read It Because You Can Finish It In Three Days (or during one long day at the beach)

Our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

The Girl on the Train

READ IT BECAUSE: You can finish it in three days (or in one day at the beach)--it's that fast of a read.  Aside from it being a pretty dark novel this is a perfect beach read.  This story touches upon all the major nerves: falling in love, betrayal, jealousy, depression, murder, delusion...you get it all--the whole gambit.  In particular, Hawkins does a great job masking the outcome from the reader--this is the pull that keeps the pages turning.

The Girl on the Train: A Novel by Paula Hawkins

You have 7 highlighted passages

have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all. Hatred floodsRead more at location 442

Blackouts happen, and it isn’t just a matter of being a bit hazy about getting home from the club or forgetting what it was that was so funny when you were chatting in the pub. It’s different. Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.Read more at location 912

We did one round of IVF, which was all we could afford. It was, as everyone had warned us it would be, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.Read more at location 1061

but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that IRead more at location 1067

He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for 

let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.Read more at location 1080

Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.Read more at location 1095

Salvage the Bones: Read It Because: You will be reminded of both the devastating scope and power of Hurricane Katrina but also of the largely forgotten swathes of the American population

Our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Read It Because: You will be reminded of both the devastating scope and power of Hurricane Katrina but also of the largely forgotten swathes of the American population.

There are some great books that I read and I think to myself: I could write something like this someday (as an aspiring writer).  These storylines and worlds are one which I have lived or could imagine living.  Salvage the Bones is NOT one of those books.  Jesmyn Ward creates a world and captures its dialogue and cultural inner monologue with a level of detail and tenderness that will keep its characters alive in your thoughts long after you've finished the novel.

It's been more than a decade since the costliest hurricane in the US history ravaged the United States. I missed this weighty novel when it was published in 2011, joining an expansive family of "Katrina fiction."  While the hurricane plays a pivotal role in the story, its presence remains lurking on the periphery for the bulk of the narrative.  Instead, Ward draws the reader inside the community surrounding a poor backwoods southern family.  It's easy to forget that these communities still exist at this level of poverty in America--in that vein it reminded me of Winter's Bone (I only saw the incredible movie, but I've heard the book upon which the film was based is equally amazing).

Ward's artistry is most strikingly displayed in how she somehow manages to humanize a character that dogfights his nursing pitbull.  Don't think that's possible?  I dare you to read the book and disagree!

Ultimately, Ward pens a timeless tale about family, loss, longing, love and death that stands as a masterpiece for the foreseeable future.

Salvage the Bones: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

You have 8 highlighted passages

He is really the color of the red earth after someone has dug in it to plant a field or pull up stones or put in a body. It is Mississippi red.Read more at location 131

Manny was holding the ball as tenderly as he would a pit puppy with pedigree papers. I wanted him to touch me that way.Read more at location 151

I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain.Read more at location 851

Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck. It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer.Read more at location 1289

There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.Read more at location 1357

“Why?” Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearm. They are gripping Daddy’s wrist, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?Read more at location 1885

The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness.Read more at location 1907

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.Read more at location 3691