Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn't Breaking
DailyGood
BY ROSEMERRY WAHTOLA TROMMER
Syndicated from gratefulness.org, Jul 17, 2022

1 minute read

 

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

***

Watch and listen to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer read this poem as a “cinepoem” here.

 

Syndicated from Gratefulness, the online magazine of the A Network for Grateful Living. This is a global organization offering online and community-based educational programs and practices which inspire and guide a commitment to grateful living, and catalyze the transformative power of personal and societal responsibility. This poem was first published in Braided Way.

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