To Be Seen
It’s all right to cry.
It’s fine to weep.
Let your body heave and let your shoulders shake.
Let this autumnal grief tear through you, ripping your leaves from your trees,
having its way with you.
Like all beautiful things, you just want to be seen.
And aren’t we all beautiful things?
That tiny child, smooth-skinned and wide-eyed, boneless limbs akimbo—laughing, whirling, dancing—carefree of time and day and year.
That boy, frown of face, as he glares up at you in adolescent angst from beneath newly bristled brows.
And that woman-of-a-certain age, creased eyes and graying hair, posture oh so erect, her furrowed lips pressed together, waiting.
Aren’t we all beautiful things?
The towering ragged brown stalks—the death—of past-prime summer grasses.
The torn and tattered edges of pale pink fairy roses, gasping out their last late fall bloom.
The low grey clouds, foreshadowing snow and sleet and storm and surge.
The very air itself, the breath that breathes us and weaves us and cleaves us to each other—child, boy, and woman; stalks and roses and storm.
Aren’t we all beautiful things—the weather turning, the time passing, the seasons changing—
lovely in our lament and desolation, in our yearning, our straining,
just waiting and wanting to be seen?
Aren’t we all, when it comes right down to it,
still just longing to be touched?
Pining for that velvety soft wonder of skin-on-skin,
that breathless wonder of warmth and promise and connection?
And aren’t we all, once again and still, just longing to be kissed—
Oh so softly,
Oh so tenderly—
As a lover’s first kiss? As a mother kisses her first child?
As a flaming red leaf slips from its branch, floating down, at last, to kiss the earth?
When it comes right down to it, even as the days grow shorter,
even as the clocks tick madly away in their stage-managed time,
aren’t we all, with our gaping and wounded hearts,
still and again just thirsting to be kissed, to be touched, to be seen
as the beauty that we always already are?
And so, yes, it’s all right to cry; it’s even finer to weep—
aching bodies heaving, burdened shoulders shaking, wounded hearts smashed wide open.
You, like me, like each and every one of us, just want to be seen.
You, me, each and every one of us—
all weeping and aching and wounded and always already beautiful.
Chris Warner
October, 2010
