Our capacity to love being limited by our capacity to grieve

By Blacksburg

your love coats my lungs like cough syrup

I felt it first—always—but hiding, I fled 

it arrives as a package deal, this life,

a fossil print on the heart

this gift of love and forbearance:

being, experiencing, noticing,

daring, caring, sharing and preparing

growing and tending larger and elastic hearts

that embrace as far as our arms can stretch,

and built to stretch and strain and bear

even more in grief “when death has come and

taken our loved ones.” c’est la vie!