after Mary Oliver
You do not have to be strong.
You do not have to carry your child-body
on your back across the frozen lake
to the small fire of your heart,
you do not have to stay outside in the ice storm
scraping frost flowers off of her fingernails
while your own hands pale and numb.
You only have to slip your grown hand
into another and let the pulsing blood
of another body warm you.
Unclench your fist of loneliness
and watch the world multiply.
Watch the tadpoles shimmer the pond
and the dragonflies spark the sky.
There is warmth everywhere: the late afternoon sun,
the shallow water, the steaming loamy soil,
the hand there for the grasping,
your own steady pulse.
Set down your ghosts, come rest by the fire.
Unshackle yourself from your frozen self.
Jennifer Saunders has work published or forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland, where she teaches skating at a hockey school and drives her hockey-playing children to many rinks.