"For every grain of salt, a thousand tears..."

They kept telling me that once we got through the terrible summer, the “summer of yuck” as we called it, that I would find light, happiness and health. They tried to reassure me, as we checked each week of chemo off the calendar, that I was one step closer to relief, to a happy ending, to life after cancer. They promised – everyone promised – that I’d feel better, that I’d resume work and parenting and everything in between, and that I’d be able to put cancer far behind me and move on.

"There is a tree somewhere, so they say. / And that tree has its roots in a culture / that spreads back millennia."

"The cries that carry / from one end  of the earth / to the other."

A Blessing for Susquehanna University’s Women’s Resource Center - October 3, 2011