The Clearing

The things you will not see
Inside your broken heart
Wish to swallow me whole—
Emotional Kudzu,
Invasive and overgrown,
Lush in all the worst ways.

But in the crisp truth of winter,
Light touches the woody vines,
Shows off the insidious strangling
The trunk has morphed itself around.

How hard it must have been
To grow as much as it did
Despite so little light,
So little air,
Its own largeness used against it.

But Love arrives
In thick gardening gloves,
Working with precision and resolve
To trim exactly what is needed.

Acting only
upon the permission
of a whisper
of surrender.