Here You Are, Alive, Alive

A poetry collection about finding light in the broken, ordinary places.

Friends, I wish I could reach across the table, take your hand in mine and finally let out the breath I’ve been holding, or perhaps shake my head in unison with yours. So much has weighed heavy on my heart recently and maybe on yours, too—violence against children, injustice towards those who deserve a fighting, fair chance, our collective body memory of the pandemic’s beginning, not to mention whatever loads you are bearing in your own home, your own family. It is so very much.

I do not know what you’re carrying or the particular ways you may feel as if you’re cracking under the pressure, but I do know you’re not alone in any of it. And I do know there’s hope to be found, light to turn our faces towards, despite it all. There always is.

It’s my hope this collection helps you look for the light.

This collection contains five poems exploring what it means to find light in the broken, ordinary, simple places.

01 - finding light in the breaking, in the splitting in half 

02 - finding light in the simplicity of a child

03 - finding light in allowing our children to be children*

04 - finding light in the way our hearts continue to beat

05 - finding light in the ordinary moments

*TW: gun violence

Thank you for taking the time to read my heart in these words.

Nana’s Sand Dollar

She, calm in the face
of all things dead and dying,
bends over the cottontail's wispy 
remains while the tiercel in some far-off nest
feeds her hatchlings with the broken body,

bends over the hole 
dug meticulously for the family dog,
covers the wooden box with a shovelful 
of black soil, unblinking, 
not yet realizing this is a garden
and there will be flowers,

bends over the photos from her birth, 
points at how water and blood can swirl 
together, how joy and agony can share a face, 
how the line of a mouth can transform
upon hearing that first, guttural wail.  

Perhaps, she says, 
because she likes the way
this solid word feels 
in her tender mouth, 

Perhaps I will not have a baby.

I smile, nod,
tell her this is also a fine choice,
seeing as I promised myself long ago
I would never say to my children: 

Wait and see, you will be just like me. 

The few things I do know I keep to myself
until she wants them:

That I was never as brave as her, 
never as determined, as eager, as alive, 

that it may seem a fearful thing 
to watch how easily a body can break,
but anyway that is just skeleton and skin,

that one time Nana found a washed up
sand dollar, sun bleached and brittle, 
that she cracked it in two, 
emptied the hollow halves,
smiled when the delicate doves
settled in the creases of her palm,

that splitting wide open 
is the only way I know to the soul, 

the only way I know  
to live a life and be whole. 

---

Firefly

Help me write a poem? 
she asks through concentrated pout, 
perched on the chair's edge,
pencil scribbling purple notepad.

I do not know how to explain
to a small child
that poems are all feeling and body
and lucid fragment of thought—

the pulsing wave, the palpable winter breath, 
the open jam jar waiting to catch 
the elusive firefly.

There are no words to explain
to her how even the firefly
is its own poem, and anyway 
there she goes

flitting and floating, 
more luminescent than anything.

---

Shooting From the Hip

I am sizing up every person
who walks through the sliding doors,
even as I bag the soft kiwis,
even as I press my nose to the melon’s ripening rind.
Paranoia is a weekly staple, now–
I jot it just under eggs,
above flour and oatmeal. 

Our place of worship, too, has a man 
who has offered up his life first 
in the case of such an event. 
We have discussed how it would go several times.

I was twenty when it was my turn to practice herding
my students’ tiny bodies onto the cold linoleum, 
into the white windowless corner.

One child made fart noises,
two stifled giggles,
a few toyed with their shoelaces,
the dried bubble gum on chair legs,
their own knotted fingers.

Each body in the room startled 
when the principal’s voice finally sliced 
through the silence.

I put on my dutiful smile, threw open 
the blinds, the door, the lights,
racked my brain for some small offering
of comfort.

(What kind of consolation 
would their mothers 
want me to give?)

When nothing came to me, 
I took them outside, 
pushed their swings as high as they would go 
into the cerulean sky, 

as if I could help them soar, 
as if I could help them grow wings, fly 
away from a world where they must 
make believe some horrifying reality 
before moving onto the alphabet. 

---

Matters of the Heart

I was five when I yelled
in the night for my mother,
certain a troop of soldiers
was marching inside my pillow;

of course it was only the thud 
of my own beating heart
echoing in my ears. 

I could not stand the sound—

I suppose I have always been afraid 
of the things inside myself 
I do not understand, 

and tell me, 
what is more confounding
than the human heart?

Tell me how it can break 
along the same fault lines 
a thousand times and still contend 
with the wreckage,

how it can harden into a stone fist 
and soften into a lump of malleable clay,

how it can leap into a throat, 
sink into a stomach,
pulse electricity and throb with ache 
all on its own.

Tell me how it can link fingers with his,  
slow to a unified tempo as we drift asleep,

how it remains steady all through the night,
plotting a hopeful resistance,
finding a way to continue on 
despite the world’s insistence
this may all be for nothing,

and when it wakes me in the dim morning,
how it knows just what to say:

Here you are.

Alive. 
Alive. 

---

Ordinary

Give me a Disney movie about the girl 
who tells herself she can do it all
and then discovers she can’t. 

That is my kind of happy ending—
set the women free, 
the bondage being all the burdens 
we lay upon our own sagging shoulders.
 
Here is how the story will go: 

No one will be exceptionally beautiful
with some eternally unchanging body. 

No one will save an entire kingdom 
with their bare hands and their boyfriend. 

No one will wear heels and a dress 
on an ordinary Tuesday. 

No one will work through 
their childhood trauma by singing. 

No. It will go like this: 

A woman will pull herself out of bed, 
her first act of heroism
given how few soft places remain 
to lay her weary body. 

She will uphold her own small kingdom
by scratching under the dog’s chin, 
scraping the jam over the toast, 
waiting for the scream of the kettle. 

She will text a friend—yes,  influencers 
also have rocky marriages and acne. 
She will listen to her therapist suggest
it may be time to shed the hard shell. 

She will scrape and rinse the plates,
offer her body again to the baby,
listen as the children sing their way 
up the stairs.

The moral? 

If, at the end of your life 
you have nothing to show
but pockets full of plain moments, 
that is plenty. 

If, at the end of your life
you find that you are only ordinary,

rejoice. 

---

Thank you, friends, for reading my heart in these poems. I hope they resonated with you and helped you remember what it is to find the light. Tell me where you are finding the light these days?

Here’s to continuing to find light in the broken, ordinary places. It’s always there.

xo,

Krista

---

Photos by Denny Müller on Unsplash, Mike Dierken on Unsplash, Akin Cakiner on Unsplash,  kyo azuma on Unsplash, Jon Tyson on Unsplash, and 戸山 神奈 on Unsplash

---

Do you like reading To Tell You The Truth? Because I love writing it.

If you want to support me and my work, there are a few ways to do that:

1. Buy Me a Coffee (Any “coffee” money I receive goes straight back into my work via workshops, classes, mentorship, and more).

2. Share To Tell You the Truth with a friend!

3. Subscribe for free to receive all my posts in your inbox. OR, upgrade to a paid subscription to further support my creative work.