A lament of empathy
Tenderness rages within me,
searching out a mouth for its voice, a weak-
ness of lip, to split a seam into a fountain.
That I were a spring, to
drench you in my life—
but that role is not mine.
I must be only the vein, the space
within the rock that living water
may smooth and shape into
a vessel, formed by and of the flow.