Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer