deep

Come little child.
Come breathe.
Come and sit silent
against my chest
and borrow my slower heartbeat
for your own
for a little while.

You are so anxious;
so much apprehension
in such a little trunk
with your funny little appendages
too small to do damage
too large to wrap back into
that lovely little womb
you can’t remember.

Come little child.
I need you to need me.
I must slow my own breathing
helping you.
It doesn’t hurt for me either
musing on disproportions
of various proportions.
We waste oxygen
when we worry.
We don’t thank the trees
as we should -
patient and unable to escape
the life so carelessly picked
when one squirrel
dropped one seed
a lifetime ago.

You lean on me.
I will lean on the wall
and we will hold each other for the tiny second
it takes to restore the feeling of the planet’s
comforting gravity
steady above all steadiness.

Come child.
breathe with me.
It is the human side of us
to breathe together
in rhythms so simple
they confound
the fate and folly
of possibility.