for LB, LI, and LS
we are not the girls we were
now with sorrow-hollowed faces
and sufferings’ silver threads
mingling with the gold
yet we would not be the women we are
with laughter-deepened eyes
and arms made strong
by love’s labours lived
were it not for the wild wonder
writ in scars upon our hearts:
we are carried through every grief
that haunts the dark
The featured image, “the new season’s fashions,” is courtesy of Amelia Freidline and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Amelia M. Freidline lives in the Kansas City suburbs with her parents and a wee terrier named for the tallest mountain in Scotland. She studied journalism at the University of Kansas and has worked as a copy editor in food media throughout her professional career; she has also edited poetry collections for Bandersnatch Books and is an occasional contributor to The Rabbit Room’s poetry Substack. On her own Substack, Dispatches to Jack, she writes about classic literature, classic films, and the other various interests of a nostalgia-riddled anachronist. She’s also a poet, a gardener, a photographer, and a wielder of butter. Amelia has been called a G.K. Chesterton fangirl and the queen of non sequiturs, and if she were a cookie she’d undoubtedly be shortbread. She loves Jesus because He loved her first.
This is beautiful, Amelia! So encouraging <3