oh, sweet backpack the things you’ve carried longing for the wind of acceptance, belonging, and intermingling but that did not fit in you pack river stains on your face from distortions at home’s about face knotted interwoven tummy from the dreams you had that went running breathing in crippling breaths and day dreaming of death a thread of Him was in sound as you stayed twisted in the world's merry go around that is what you carried i graduated and crawled out you stayed back it was not good where you dwelled we both knew that you heard from a little bird that it was rough for me too although miles away i continued to carry our layered sand started to meet with Him yet continued dancing with the land a following graduation surfaced you remained it became worse where you slept but we knew that you heard from little sparrow i met someone now we all carry the burdens of complication but I started to learn to hand some off to the One it’s been eighteen years i crawled back its good to see you it’s been up and down and all around but you knew that as you lay on my back and travel with me now the heaviest of stones have skipped away just like little bird we can now graciously fly away currently what’s in our pack is completely held by Him and in all reality He has always held all the things in our backpack
Scripture Inspiration . . .
Psalm 55:6 and Psalm 118:5
Pictures . . .
First photo: My Nike backpack that I found in the midst of packing up my dad’s house after he passed. Second photo: Me at summer camp, maybe 14 years young. Third photo: Me the other night, holding me, at 41.
Thoughts?
I would love to know how this poem spoke to you. Feel free to comment. Blessings beautiful ones 🖤
Ashley, there is something about the backpack remaining that really moved me.
You don't throw it away at the end. You put it back on.
And yet it doesn't seem to carry the same weight anymore.
It made me think that perhaps healing isn't always getting rid of what reminds us of where we've been. Sometimes we can return to the very thing that once held so much pain and discover that our relationship to it has changed. We can carry the memory without being carried by the wound.
But your final lines took me somewhere even deeper. The poem begins with everything the backpack—and you—had to carry, but ends with the recognition that He was holding all of it the entire time.
Maybe that is one of the strange gifts of returning eighteen years later: discovering that while you were carrying more than you knew how to bear, you were also being carried in ways you couldn't yet see.
And now the woman at 41 can come back for the girl at 14...only to discover that He had never left her there.
Beautiful, Ashley.
This was so beautiful and poignant! I love how the backpack and you become almost as one by the end of the poem!