How Much

How many losses can you bear? 
How many mysteries can you endure?
How many times can the ground beneath you shift
and you still, somehow, stand?

How much pain does it take
reduce you, to make you less
than you were created to be?
How many broken pieces can fall off

and the machine still run?

About this poem

This poem is not a complaint or a mourning. Much in life is good despite all the painful stuff. I don’t want to minimize either, the good or the bad. But it’s been a rough year. Beyond rough, a year of lost lives, lost loves, lost hopes, and more. And it’s a question I do ask myself.

The answer of course, is more than we think. The answer of course, is only God knows, not said in a platitude way, but in truth. Only he knows, and I at least, have to lean on that knowledge. That’s why he’s God, and I’m not. One of the reasons anyway.

The picture was taken at an antique fair. At times that is how I feel, more a drawer of parts than a whole thing. And that is OK for now. I’m not putting the pieces together, after all. The big guy is

Tom