I Want to Feel my Heart Beat Again
& maybe even dance for a while—
1. I want to dance again.
Dance from the root of the coldest pomegranate seeded in the soil of my body— half-cracking. Ripening into a round fruit. A tooth gone pink after a day of eating strawberries.
2. To feel desire again. My body loosening up. Re-writing its own story, like the gnarled roots of an oak tree.
The knots in the back of my spine silkening. Unspooling like the river-long neck of a snake.
3. To not think about anything. My head crashing against a silk-wrinkled pillowcase.
Wrinkles small as the calluses on my grandmother’s face. The kinds whose broken maps I would trace right to her head— her hair-line now greying.
4. I want to rewind the clock. Go back to the time I could place my palm on her half-creased cotton shirt.
Behind which I could hear her big heart, beating. The heart rings like a clock striking, I would say. She would smile at me, ruffling the black strands of my hair.
5. I want to go back to the time before she collapsed.
Tumbled over to the floor.
A long snake, unspooling. A river waiting to be lifted. An impossible task, even for a muscular man like my father.
6. What I want is to unwind the clock. Wring it. Rack it open until every arrow comes apart.
So that no arrow can find its way back to the other. At least for a while. I am a child, angry & pure. All I want to do is avenge time.
7. I want to back to the time my granny would sing me hymns before sleep.
The smell of sandalwood pervading my senses. In my dreams, I had a 1000 oak trees growing in my body. Every limb a miracle.
8. I don’t want to be a person. I want to be a mango tree.
More graceful. Bow down not in shame, but in grace. Surrender to the music of myself. To allow myself to be struck by sunlight— ray after ray. So that my cramped limbs could learn to flower open. Like the knotted barks of an ancestral tree.
So beautiful, I see you smiling with the pink-stained teeth and exhale my own smile.
I found this poem in my inbox this morning and seems like a perfect bookend to this essential process of longing for wholeness again:
No Matter What They Say
You do not have to get over it.
You will carry your grief
and be carried by loss
in any way the carrying happens.
As if you had a choice.
Grief builds rooms inside you
no one else will ever see,
rooms with doors
only you can pass through
filled with songs or silence
only you can hear.
Rest here. Or dance here.
Shout. Or whisper. Rise
like milkweed seeds on the wind.
Or lie. Here, you can only do it right.
Here, there are no other eyes
or ears to tell you what to do
or how long it will take
or what choices to make.
And if you are weeping, weep.
And if you are dry, you are dry.
The rest of the world
can talk about stages
of grief and how it should be,
but you, you do not have to listen.
-Rosemerry Trommer
"So that no arrow can find its way back to the other. At least for a while. I am a child, angry & pure. All I want to do is avenge time."
🖤