Growing Down

Know that growth
more often looks like
letting go
than adding more;
having all the extra
stripped away
until all that’s left
is Love.
–Drew Jackson

 

Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way.

 

Like mountain midwives of old,
Amy arrives at dawn bearing

skilled art and ample cheer.

She’s here to help us tend our cat, 

Aria, who’s lost a leg to cancer. 

 

These healers need steady hands

and even firmer nerves: 

my wife to scruff, lift and place 

the stitched, shivering patient; 

Amy to administer pain meds,

then food through a tube 

to an animal so alarmed by touch, 

we couldn’t pet her during 

her first two years with us.

 

Now she allows all she cannot change, 

accepting the hands that keep her alive.

All creatures blessed to survive

beyond infancy, including ourselves,

must face that the thing least 

desired is often the very offering

spirit most requires. 

– Ed Davis

 

Ed Davis has published poems, stories and essays and poems in many anthologies and journals. His poetry collection, Time of the Light, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His latest novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the 2010 Hackney Award for an unpublished novel.