Love tenderizes everything. I tell myself this upon waking, when darkness gives way to dew and even the desert becomes supple again. Love tenderizes everything. I repeat it at dusk, as we sit on the portal and the sky swirls above us. I tell myself this when my daughter rests her head on my chest with a sigh, and murmur it like an incantation in moments when my heart feels cracked and crusted over, when the world’s roughness scrapes against my senses.

Love tenderizes everything.

Take, for example, Andrea Gibson’s “Say Yes.” I have carried this poem like an olive branch since my early twenties. It begins with the physics of resonance: “When two violins are placed in a room, if a chord on one violin is struck, the other will sound the note. If this is your definition of hope, this is for you.”

I remember the heaviness I carried back then—the sense of distance I felt from myself and every other living thing, except for those few magnificent friends and family members who stayed near through that long, shadowed season. Yet somehow, the poet’s voice—two violins, a shared note—evoked the earthly harmonies of life, even then. Those lines nested inside me, tending to the wounded place as only poetry can: with its small sticks, feathers, and flickers of song.

Grief is never singular. Like love, it layers in harmonics above the baseline of our existence. A father’s voice saying hi, sweetie, carries the ache of a future absence braided into today’s loving presence. There is grief for the unraveling of our ecological sanity and safety; for the unnamed burdens children carry, and our longing to keep them well and near. Sometimes there are wisps of sorrow for the unwritten books and furniture of that other life—the one I did not choose. There is grief, too, for the relentless rush of time, for how we quicken away from our bodies’ native pace.

And then there are the most visceral reminders of our fragile, mutual keeping—the incontrovertible losses that stun with their seeming impartiality, confronting us with the vulnerability of a life that was just here but is no longer.

Today, again, the world rushes in—unpredictable and uncertain. Thankfully, for this moment, I can adjust to a gentler lens. My body settles into the bruise, albeit tender to the touch. I want to tell everyone how needful it is to be kind, how we depend on love, and then I want to share the delight of a child who has just discovered raspberries fruiting on their vines.

The weight of love—its 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows—shapes the day into something bearable and even, at times, beautiful. And in the wake of Andrea’s passing, as their words—earnest, luminous—seem all at once everywhere, startled into the air like a murder of crows in an open field, I find myself bowing to the gift of yet another poem that undoes me and then puts me back together again.

“every time i ever said i want to die”

by Andrea Gibson

A difficult life is not less

worth living than a gentle one.

Joy is simply easier to carry

than sorrow. And your heart

could lift a city from how long

you’ve spent holding what’s been

nearly impossible to hold.

This world needs those

who know how to do that.

Those who could find a tunnel

that has no light at the end of it,

and hold it up like a telescope

to know the darkness

also contains truths that could

bring the light to its knees.

Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,

look close, tell us what you see.

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