—after Frida Kahlo’s Memory (Mexico) 1937
Heartbreak moves with no wind and no water, little light, and not much life.
Heartbreak is a stiff dress on the clothesline, suspended in silence.
At onset, heartbreak feels like one foot on land, one in the sea.
Or heartbreak is like a body with missing parts.
It is heartbreaking to see love in ruins, bleeding out upon the ground.
People die of heartbreak every day, a real physical phenomenon.
A mother’s heart breaks many times before it breaks, another marvel.
Do you think heartbreak is all about the apple? When was heartbreak born?
And if God knows heartbreak, why is He silent when his children’s hearts break?
In heartbreak, night rules, and dawn becomes the mother of all miracles.
Memory is heartbreak’s reservoir, its infection source, its habitat for pain.
White-winged dove and mountain-mist are heartbreak’s colors.
Heartbreak is a joy-stopper, a faith-tester, a filcher of life, a thief.
Where do we go after heartbreak, after the chest has been impaled?
Where do we go after the long wait for transplant, organs failing with every breath?
After the young father gives the nod to the medical team? After a sister’s kiss
goodbye? Where do we go after the nurse adjusts the drips and the beeping
stops? After she straightens the sheets?
Published: Verse-Virtual Feb 2025