We Grow Again: A Poem and an Update

Here’s a little insight into the life of Annalise: it’s finals week and I feel like I’m barely treading water.

Last week, I was really sick. Like, it-feels-like-my-ribcage-is-splitting-when-I-cough sick. I lost my voice, presented my thesis (yes, in that order), ran into my roommate’s closet with my head, and forgot to eat a bunch of times. I’m okay now, but that entire week I was in my room without people, a situation that is my Kryptonite. All the sleep I got was great, but it also meant that I fell really behind on all of my homework and writing.

I’ve been feeling disconnected ever since—disconnected from myself, disconnected from my community, even disconnected from God. I think part of that was sitting in a room by myself for so many days, but it’s a feeling I can’t seem to shake. The other day, some friends and I were driving to a local café to study, and the sky was an almost artificial blue, but my heart felt closed in. I told them about how I was feeling, and one of my friends said, “I think that sometimes, God gives us these times to wean us, like a baby weans off of milk. He wants more for us.”

I don’t understand how someone can spout such wisdom and keep his eyes on the road at the same time.

A few weeks ago, two of my best friends and I drove to a seaside town and bought quesadillas and rambled through the town and pawed through antiques. It was the first warm weekend and finally marked the beginning of a New England spring. There were so many blessed dogs sniffing happily along the brick-paved streets, and the branches of the trees quivered on the edge of bursting into bloom. And it made me nostalgic (as everything does these days). It made me think about new things growing, and how the springtime is the culmination of all of the determined trees that grow quietly through the winter, and how we don’t see that change until this time of year. I thought about my own quiet growth, and tried to think back to who I was and forward to who I am, and how this life is a constant cycle of seasons and growing pains and of dying to ourselves and bursting back to life again. That time of bursting through the dirt is coming again.

That’s what this poem is about.

*

We Grow Again

it is a great & glorious

day

to drive down to the

sea

where the air is

salt-shaken & warm

where the trees are

red-ruddy-red

with bloody newness.

the dogs, they

bless the pavement

with their wise noses

the birds, they

bless the sky

with their honeyed song

and we? well, we

bring a blessing

all our own.

we kiss every bud

and greet each

bridal blossom

goodmorning

good morning

Good Morning