Keep My Heart Soft
Last week was so ugly.
When I don’t feel like myself, I find it hard to trust my own voice. Prose slips away. Poetry arrives—but in wild shapes and half-melted lines. Of all the bad poetry, I wrote a single villanelle that seemed to hold some promise. It was full of iambic pentameter with the kinds of images I reach for when it all turns upside down. I read it aloud to my daughter. She nodded politely, then asked what was for dinner.
And so I set it aside.
Even after disposing of it, the refrain still echoes from tercet to quatrain, all the way into this week:
In all of this, O Lord, keep my heart soft.
I’ve been turning that phrase over and over, like a string of prayer beads in my pocket. Something to hold. Something to touch when the edges get out of focus.
This is what I know: when the world feels dark, I begin to see only the dark. A kind of film settles over the light. It becomes harder to believe in the goodness of things. This isn’t cynicism, not exactly. It’s more like a forgetting. A fogged-over lens. The still-beating core of kindness gets obscured behind everything sharp and cruel.
There were three shootings before the week was halfway through—unspeakable horror. Grief rippling outward, settling in the community, permeating everything. I watched a man steal groceries and receive an excessive beating. I found myself between a man abusing an elderly protestor holding a “Peace on Earth” sign, as though compassion had become a provocation. I saw someone kick a man from sleep in a parking lot and tell him to leave, though he clearly had nowhere to go. When I looked in his vacant eyes I could see he had given up on finding any rest. I turned ahead and rushed along to my next meeting, and I hated myself for it. Privately, in the parts of life I don’t talk about, things are tense and silent. I am dealing with the consequences of things that I cannot pay for.
And when I feel like this, tight and brittle, I think what I want most is, maybe, encouragement? A few unhurried minutes. The ordinary grace of small talk, or stillness— a place to let things rise up in their own time.
And it did come. And it went. And now it’s time to do the work. I don’t think the world softens on its own; we do it for one another, in the smallest ways. I keep coming back to that refrain, hoping it will stave the frost so I might help shake off more. I know it will. I can already feel it.
In all of this, O Lord, keep my heart soft.