you could just live it.
not everything has to be told.
let it shine from your ordinary life, all the ways in which you manage to ignore the noise.
all the ways in which you have learnt how to walk away from the things that tug at the sleeve of your bones.
you do not see the way that your face lights up when you see someone you love.
did you know that your mouth breaks open into the shape of joy when you wrap yourself in their arms?
—how your eyes are reborn when your name walks out of their mouth.

and you? all the pieces that you are shaped from.
have you discovered how to hold yourself with kindness?
have you travelled to every dark thing you are made of—stumbled over all your secrets, those locked rooms?
and once there—can you sit in the silence of everything you want to forget and still use the soft words that you give to others?

you cannot give what you do not have.

run your fingers over the deep lines, find the hidden borders, the knotted fractures of semi-knitted bone.
speak their names, let them ring out behind your eyes.

they are you.
they are you.
they are you.

some call it darkness. some call it failure. some call it sin.

it’s real name is shame.

hold it. hold it. hold it.
disarm it with kindness.
never (try to) forget.
this is how it grows stronger.

hold it. hold it. hold it.
disarm it with love.
it might take a long time, but it will find its way to the light.

there it will grow into a tree called compassion.

all these small moments that you have gathered in your hands.
all the sounds. all the colours. all the shapes.

not everything has to be told.
you could just live it in your own quiet way—cradle your life like the fragile thing it is, and then when your heart is a bucket filled with everything pressed down and ready to spill, you could go and tell it to the trees, or the moss, or the wind as it blows over the water.

listen! listen! listen!
all the pieces of your name are already holy in someone’s mouth.
the gold, spilling from you like water.

hold it. hold it. hold it.

— all the pieces of your name are already holy in someone’s mouth | just as you are.

© Liezel Graham 2021.

Image by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash. {https://unsplash.com/photos/naU5BXEi9p4}

hoping this finds you softly holding all the parts of who you are, even the ones called shame.

x